


What Happens Next

by deluxemycroft



Series: Ouroboros [16]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: A Reckoning, After the battle, Alien Cultural Differences, Alternate Timelines, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, Asgardian Culture (Marvel), Captain America Sam Wilson, Cultural Differences, Cultural References, Deaf Clint Barton, Fix-It, Fix-It of Sorts, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Incest, Infinity Gauntlet, Infinity Gems, Infinity Stone Soul World (Marvel), Jotunn Loki (Marvel), Loki (Marvel) Does What He Wants, M/M, Manipulation, Molestation, Muteness, Platonic Relationships, Platonic Soulmates, Soul Stone (Marvel), Suicide Attempt, Thanos (Marvel) Dies, Time Jump, Time Shenanigans, Timeline Shenanigans, Unhealthy Relationships, Warning: Loki (Marvel), loki makes a choice, selective mutism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-20
Updated: 2020-07-19
Packaged: 2021-03-03 21:27:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 27,932
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24812293
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deluxemycroft/pseuds/deluxemycroft
Summary: It is after the end of the world.
Relationships: Brunnhilde | Valkyrie/Natasha Romanov (Marvel), Clint Barton & Loki, Clint Barton/Laura Barton, Clint Barton/Laura Barton/Stephen Strange, Clint Barton/Stephen Strange, James "Bucky" Barnes/Sam Wilson, Loki & Thor (Marvel), Loki/Steve Rogers
Series: Ouroboros [16]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1199902
Comments: 9
Kudos: 30





	1. part one

**Author's Note:**

> heyo! welcome to part....16!!! wow!! of my ouroborus series. it's been a hell of a ride getting here, and we still have a ways to go. but we're over the biggest hurdle: thanos is dead, well and truly, which means there must be fallout. loki may have planned for a few years for every single eventuality that he can think of, but there's always going to be something he can't plan for.
> 
> so here we are. i tried to warn for everything but shit is about to break bad. i also usually try to keep the chapter lengths fairly average but this fic didn't quite work out that way. and YES that's a lot of tags for a 25k fic but i tried to warn for everything lmao
> 
> fic is already finished, updates every saturday.
> 
> good luck!

There he stood, on a single spot of bare ground in the mass of roots around him, hands clasped behind his back as he tilted his head up to look up and up and up the length of the tree before him.

He did not know how long it had been, how long he had been standing there, but it felt both a very long time and none at all. It felt as if time had no meaning anymore, if it had any to begin with for one like him.

He only cared about time for what it meant for those he had left behind.

Even as far as his eyes looked, there was always more _up_. He had been there before, of course; there were very few places he had not been. He made rather a point of learning all about places he should not go and then going there. But he had never quite taken the time to take in the entirety of the World Tree.

He knew quite a bit about the World Tree. Yggradisl was a great galaxy, within contained many other smaller spiral galaxies, which others saw as planets and Aesir like himself saw as realms. Realms were not always planets, and planets were not always realms. But they did have some overlapping features; those who lived upon them, those who fought them, and that who watched them. The Tree was of such height that measuring it in numbers would only confuse the attempt to make sense of something that was not meant to be understood. But Loki had been from the tip of its leaves to the very bottom of its roots. He had wondered when Steve gave him that jewelry if he had known the significance of the Tree to their culture.

For a being such as him, one who was not only immeasurably powerful with seidr and other similar skills, as well as having god-blood in his veins and on his hands, and being the great many son-of-a-son-of-a-king, the Great Tree was a tree. It was other things, of course, but one such as him saw it as it was meant to be seen: a tree.

To others, it was many spiral galaxies, all connected by the Great Tree galaxy. It was astonishingly vast and there were those who dwelt within it that did not even know of its existence. He had been taught to tell others lesser than him that Yggdrasil was a galaxy, for it would surely only serve to confuse smaller minds that their entire world rested in the bows of a tree.

In the grand scheme of things, there were very few differences between galaxies and trees. There were many things that were less similar and far fewer things that were more similar.

He stood at the base of the Tree and looked up. 

He had thought he would be more tired than this. Of course, he did not quite know how long it had been, but even for one as powerful as him, he had done impossibly great acts of seidr and he had achieved the impossible: Thanos was dead. He was certain of it. He had plotted and planned and schemed and worked to make it happen, and there had been no other possible outcome other than victory. He was Loki, after all, and when he truly and absolutely put his mind to something, he did not fail.

He did wonder what he was doing here, but Loki had wondered that many times in his life, so it was of no particular concern to him now. He hoped those important to him were alright, that they had survived the reckoning and whatever had turned the world white.

He would say that he did not care what happened to him as long as those he cared about were alive and well and hale, but that would be a lie. He desperately wished to find out what a life was like with both Thanos and Thor dead, with no inevitable end hanging over his head. Life was circular, he knew, and there were things that were going to happen regardless. That was fate, after all, and their lives were dictated by fate. He was merely a vessel for fate.

He laughed at that, shaking his head a bit. Loki, a mere vessel? Loki, a vehicle for the whims of those greater than him? If there were even beings greater than he. He was no longer allowing anyone else to control him; he’d had plenty of that in his life. He turned his gaze away from the Tree’s endless trunk and turned his gaze out to the abyss.

He remembered falling, the endless descent into the Void and the Vast. He had fallen from the Bifrost and he had plummeted down through the abyss, and there had been _nothing_. Nothing for so long, and then there had been the opposite of nothing, and he had suffered. Oh, how he had _suffered_. In retrospect, it had been the most exquisite kind of suffering, suffering that had heretofore been unparalleled. He had thought Thor had been cruel to him but he had not even _known_ cruelty, not truly, not so agonizingly, not until the fall, not until he had plummeted into the Void.

The Other had found him, of course, in much the same way Thor had rescued him from Killan and the great deep dark he had been held captive in. Taken from one torture to another. Was that not his life, was that not Loki’s life, one trauma to another? One pain to another? Was that how life was meant to be lived? Was he there only to suffer, or did he exist for the spaces in between suffering, for the bright spots in life?

There were inevitabilities, after all, but Loki had never cared much for the plans of others.

He looked out into the dark, and perhaps the dark looked back.

There were no other sounds besides the dragon chewing on the roots of the Tree. It was very faint, but even very faint sounds sounded very loud when there were no other sounds. He had met Nidhoggr before; had even once schemed to get the beast free. It had not worked, of course, but it had been a particularly clever and dastardly plan, if he did say so himself.

But he was Loki, and he was both better and greater than all else.

He turned back to the World Tree and looked up again. He wondered where he would go from here.

He reached out one hand to touch the bark of the closest root, but before he could, it felt as if all the breath had been punched out of him and when he blinked, he was somewhere else.

It was a peculiar place, and when he spread out his seidr to find out where he was and how to get away, his seidr was not there. For the very first time in his life, Loki did not have it. He was trapped in this place, caught in between the light and dark, feeling like he had suddenly lost all of his limbs. The great expanse of the strange world stretched out endlessly in all directions, a flat plane of existence. It was a peculiar color, he noted, some strange shade of orange-red that reminded him of something he could not quite place. There was no discernable sun but the world was lit, and if what was above was the sky, then it was cloudy. The air felt heavy and he was weighed down, although he knew not with what. He wore simple clothes, somehow, a plain tunic and leggings and comfortable loafers. He thought everything he was wearing was black but the lighting in this peculiar place was so strange that he couldn’t be quite certain.

He turned, looking around, but there was nothing other than empty space stretching off into the horizon in every direction. He was unable to use his seidr to float in the air but somehow it happened anyway, and he sat cross-legged in the air, propping his chin up on one hand. He was caught somewhere strange, somewhere peculiar, but oddly enough, he was not concerned.

He thought. He had all the time in the world to think, it seemed.

The world around him was barren and formless and Loki barely paid attention to it as he floated along.

He remembered everything at once and simultaneously knew nothing at all.

He had been killed very many times. He knew for certain it was many, many thousands of times. Thor had done terrible, terrible things to him in his quest to defeat Thanos, and Loki now knew the full breadth of every single one of them. He _knew_. Thor had hurt him in ways beyond imagining, beyond pain, beyond time, beyond what Loki could even comprehend. He did not understand how Thor had come out of it even somewhat sane. Thousands and thousands of years, trying the same thing over and over again, always failing and failing and killing his own brother every time in the end. Loki had no sympathy—nor would he ever—but he supposed he now understood, now that he _knew._

He saw it all. He saw every life he had lived, every life Thor had _made_ him live. Thousands upon thousands of them, all ending in the same way: Mjolnir, crashing into him, thunder bursting his veins, more pain than he had ever experienced before. And now, he felt them all at once, and he sobbed all the more for it. Thor had slaughtered him, time and time again, and Loki had stood up again each time, knowing his inevitable end. Thor had told him so many times what he had done before and Loki had stood before him each time and refused to back down.

Besides the last time, of course. Then, of course, he had gone to his knees, and he had pledged fidelity, and he had died in the end anyway.

Thor had killed him, as he had done so many times before. Thor had brought Mjolnir down upon him for the last time and he had refused to be the Loki that kneeled for him any longer. He had not achieved anything in the end, with Thor. He had died anyway, even for all the pain that had been wrought and all his own sacrifices. So what had been the purpose, then? Had there even been one?

Or had it all been to bring him here, to this life? To the people and men he loved?

He sighed at the thought. He hoped they were okay, that they had survived, that they had gotten home safe. He missed them, and he saw his past lives and saw that he loved Steve and Clint and Bucky and Sam and Balder and all the rest of them more than he had loved anyone before. That was the purpose of it all, wasn’t it, to love? To find those he loved and to keep them safe. For what other reason did Loki live?

He had known Steve from the start. They had been friends. Loki was...lucky did not even begin to describe it. He still barely understood how someone like Steve Rogers would see anything of use in him. He knew he would never deserve it, of course; how could he? How could one like him deserve _anything_ of someone like Steve? But he supposed that life was not about deserving. Life was about what was gotten out of it, about the other people, about what he could do for those he loved.

Or anything else, he supposed. Thor was dead, Thanos was dead. He had achieved it all.

He was free.

Or, as free as he could be while locked in this...peculiar world or realm or wherever it was.

He loved. Oh, how he loved; warm and selfish and possessive and cruelly, but it was love all the same. Even as he was not made for love—he was made for hate, for revenge, for evil things—he _did_ love, and he did so fiercely and without repentance. He loved like he did most things: underhandedly, darkly, with a bit of a hidden agenda, and with all that he was. He had done all of this for those he loved, after all, had sacrificed everything, had gone to war for them and would do so again.

War. He considered war.

He had said before that he was not the type to go to war, but he was and he knew it. He had fought in many battles and many more wars; it was part of who he was, where he had come from, the history in his blood. The many son-of-a-son-of-a-king, after all. Inevitabilities and all that. But his war usually looked a bit different than others. Subverting expectations was a particular skill of his, something he had always excelled at.

He wondered if there were any more reasons for war, now that Thanos was dead.

If there were, and Loki assumed there would be, it would no longer be his decision. His husband was the War Prince, after all, and it would be up to him and their King. Loki would follow Steve anywhere, into war and to peace, and if Steve wished for war, then Loki would fight to his last breath.

If he got out of this accursed place, that was.

But that was a problem for future Loki. For now, he floated over the peculiar ground in this peculiar place and thought. The world around him was flat and shapeless, and the air heavy and stale and almost rancid. He knew he was moving but did not quite know how; there was no air movement and no landmarks he was moving closer to or further away from. But he moved regardless and continued to think.

He did not know the exact number of timelines or time loops he had been dragged through, but what he knew now was that each Loki he pulled out was a modification on the one before. They were all different, all _more_ Loki than the one before. Whoever he had been in the first life, Life One, that Loki was...he was as a man to a god. He was an ant to a boot. He was the first in a very, very long line that led to the Loki that had been ruined and broken and shattered and then remade so many times that it could be said he was both barely Loki and more Loki than he ever had been. 

But there had only ever been one Thor. All along, Thor had been the same. He was no more or less Thor than he was when he first began the scheme to bring Loki back. He had been muddled and confused and spelled by the Norn Stones and Frigga, but he was still that same Thor. He was someone who had only ever been himself and had never been forced into being someone new, and he was only as powerful as he ever had been.

Loki, however, was very powerful. Far more powerful than he ever had been. He could’ve piled every Loki that came before all together and even their combined might would not even make a dent in the things he was now capable of. He did not know quite _how_ he knew yet, but he knew he was part of something massive, something powerful, something heretofore unforeseen. He was a being of incredible power, he knew, with abilities even he did not know the full breadth of. He had known something was happening, something was changing, but now that he had all of this time to _think_ and remember, he came upon the truth.

He was something unforeseen. He was Loki. None had come before him and none would come after. He was...unique was not even enough of a word. Unique implied there _could_ be comparison, implied that somewhere out in all the realms, in all the galaxies, that someone could measure up to him, but there were no men like him. 

Well.

Clint, he supposed, if he could even be said to be a man.

He wondered if Steve had picked up any skill with seidr. Humans were not meant to wield seidr, but perhaps, given Steve’s close proximity to him, along with their marriage, he had picked up something. He could wield the Power Stone, after all, and Loki had seen him do quite incredible things with it.

He wondered what it said about him that he seemed to change everyone he met. He hoped it was for the better but doubted it was.

Very far off in the distance, just coming over the horizon, he saw something. He stopped moving for a moment as he noticed them. It looked...was it a person? He did not know how long he had been in this place but it felt like a very long time.

He began to move again, floating through the air, moving ever closer to the strange figure off in the distance, and as he grew closer, dread began to rise in Loki’s throat. There were very few figures he knew as well as this one, very few silhouettes he would recognize until he died. But none of the other familiar shapes filled him with as much dread as this one.

He knew those shoulders, he knew those arms, he knew the cut of his waist, he knew the very shape of his head. Loki knew Thor best, he always had, and now, on that strange place, he knew his brother was before him again, dead or not, _soul_ or not.

Thor stared off into the distance. He stood in one place, hands at his sides, looking at what seemed to be nothing in particular, waiting. Loki stopped moving through the air and waited with him. He did not quite know what they were waiting for but assumed it was him.

He lowered his feet down to the ground and when they touched down, they made a small sound.

Thor’s head moved first and then he turned back to Loki, smiling as he did.

Loki wished to flinch back, wished to run, wished to vanish from whatever place this was and never see Thor again, but he merely lifted his chin and stared his brother down.

“Brother,” Thor said, “at last.”

It was instinctive to reach for his seidr, but it was inaccessible. Thor had always been stronger than him, but perhaps Loki could outrun him. All he needed to do was stay one step ahead, just out of arm’s reach, and perhaps he would not be safe, but he would be alive, and he could not imagine any other end than Thor killing him.

But Thor did not come closer. He merely looked at Loki like he had finally seen the light at the end of a very long, dark tunnel.

Thor smiled in relief, in grief, in joy.

Loki glowered at him, wanting to turn away, but instead his grit his teeth and growled out, “Where is this? How are you _here?_ How do you speak? You are a soul and you are _mute._ ”

Thor’s smile only widened but thankfully, he did not move closer. “I am all that is left,” he said, “of the great Thor Odinson, Mad King of Asgard. I am the sacrifice.”

Cryptic fucking bastard. “This is the Soul Stone, then? The World inside the Stone?”

“Aye,” Thor agreed, that wretched smile still upon his face. “I’d thought it would be that pet of yours, you know. The one who killed Thanos.”

Loki’s eyes narrowed and he didn’t stop himself from defensively crossing his arms over his chest. “You won’t speak of him,” he demanded. “And he may be the Keeper of the Soul Stone, but I am his Keeper, so whichever that is his is mine first.”

Thor nodded at that, spreading his hands out at his sides. “Then welcome home, brother.”

“Home?” Loki repeated incredulously. “This is no home of mine. Nowhere you are can ever be _home._ ”

“You’ll find there is no way out.”

Loki frowned at that and looked around the flat plane of the Soul World, wondering a bit at that. Yes, Clint was technically the Keeper, but as Loki did own him, it went to say that everything of his belonged to Loki, which meant that the Soul Stone belonged to Loki as well. Loki deduced that meant the Soul Stone should obey him, but he had questions he needed answered first, even though seeing Thor made him feel nauseous and his skin felt like it was going to crawl off his body.

“Then I will have to make one,” he finally shrugged, eyes flickering back to Thor. “But not now. First: how long have you been in here?”

“Since Cli—”

“Do _not_ say his name!”

Thor laughed at that. “Of course, brother. Of course. You always were so possessive over your toys, weren’t you? Never wanted me to have anything to do with them.”

“You always _broke_ them,” Loki muttered angrily, shaking his head. “You’d find the one thing I cared about and you would bring it to me and then crush it in your hands or tear it apart and then make me _thank you_ for it. His name will not fill your mouth; I will not stand for it. I killed you once and I will not hesitate to do it again.”

For a moment, Thor looked genuinely concerned for his life, and then he waved Loki off with a laugh. “Of course,” he teased. “The great and powerful Loki thinks he can out-maneuver the Soul Stone, is that it? Best an Infinity Stone?”

“I bested you,” Loki pointedly reminded him. “And I bested Thanos. I cut my teeth on objects more powerful than an Infinity Stone and you know it. Now, _answer me._ ”

Thor’s mouth opened and he began talking without his consent, eyes going wide in shock. “Time doesn’t pass normally here. I have no idea how long it’s been. It feels like centuries.”

Loki nodded and glanced around the empty expanse of the Soul World again, some vague thought in the back of his mind arising with a desire to sit and drink tea. To his surprise, a small table and two chairs appeared a few feet in front of him, along with a tea set. Loki’s mouth curled in a small, pleased smile, and he sat, pouring himself a cup before motioning for Thor to sit as well. Thor glared at him as he complied, curling his hands into massive fists in his lap.

Loki regarded his brother for a very long time. The tea tasted absolutely terrible but it gave him something to do with his hands while he tried to put his thoughts in order.

He finally began with, “You wanted it to be Clint because you thought you would be able to overpower him and be in charge again.” He looked around the Soul World again with a bit of a frown. “Why am I even here?”

“You achieved your goal,” Thor told him. “When... _he_ sacrificed my soul for the Stone, he took it with intent to achieve a set goal. The Stone pulls in the one who achieved their goal.”

Interesting. So he and Clint were truly interchangeable, then, for Loki knew it had been Clint’s arrow that had finally killed the Mad Titan. If even the Soul Stone could not tell them apart...well, they _were_ soul bound, and Clint’s soul did belong to Loki...it made sense, he supposed. Better him in the Stone than Clint, surely. Not that he didn't think that Clint couldn’t handle himself against Thor, but he didn't like the thought of taking the risk. Better his own blood be spilt and all that.

He focused back on Thor. “What comes next?”

Thor shrugged one shoulder, failing not to look annoyed. “We talk,” he said. “It’s your World, after all.”

Loki smiled.


	2. part two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Three doors.

Loki clawed his way out of the Soul Stone and stepped out onto the lawn in front of Clint’s house. His hands were shaking and his breathing was uneven and quick and he could feel his heart trembling. A long roll of heavy parchment floated next to him and he carefully rolled it up, cautious to not rip it or catch sight of any of it. He’d written it down, written it all down. Every single thing Thor had said. Every sickening, disgusting word. The Soul Stone was nestled in one of his palms and he carefully tucked it and the parchment away into a pocket dimension.

He took a deep breath to settle himself down and looked around the property, frowning slightly; it looked _off_ somehow, a bit strange, but he couldn’t quite place how. He turned his head as he heard the familiar bang of the porch door, Clint’s footsteps on the stairs and then on the grass.

He had his seidr back and was checking himself over to make sure he had come out of the Soul Stone whole when he saw some peculiar movement out of the corner of his eye, and he looked up to see three women standing in front of him. It took him only a moment to recognize them.

The Norns.

Urd, the eldest; Verdandi, the middle; and Skuld, the youngest.

What was, what is, and what will be.

“ _Lo—_ ”

He blinked and the four of them were back in Yggradisl’s roots and before he could gather his seidr to flee from them and return home, Verdandi stepped forward and brought down her hand in a sharp slice, and something caught onto Loki’s bones and ripped him through time and space.

They landed inside Yggdrasil, very, very deep inside the Tree. The amount of seidr surrounding them made Loki stagger back for a moment before he gathered himself back together and glared at the three of them. He had met them before, on an ill-advised trip where he’d clawed and cut and pulled himself inside the World Tree and demanded to speak with them and, of course, they had refused to help him with Thor. It was meant to be impossible to meet with the Norns on any other design than their own, but he’d always pushed past what others thought to be impossible and made his own way. He could only imagine what they wished from him now.

“Well?” he asked of them, a bit cross.

“A great crime has been committed upon you, Loki of Asgard,” Urd told him, her voice like rotting leaves. Loki hid his reflexive grimace. “We have come to pay restitution.”

Ugh. “No need,” Loki told the three of them, glancing around the room and pointedly turning his back on them as he looked around for an exit. It was a fairly small room, with dark wood walls and a dirt floor, with a low-sided stone well in the exact center of the room, a bucket hanging down from a pulley and rope on the ceiling. “Send me home and leave me to it. That is all the restitution I need.”

“By killing Thanos,” Skuld began, and her voice was so young and light and airy that Loki turned to look back at her, “you have severed the spell that trapped you.”

“Aye,” Loki agreed.

“You also killed the two that bound you to this spell, and you cast aside the accursed Norn Stones that enacted this great power,” Skuld continued, Loki narrowing his eyes at her. “You kept them safe with a Keeper and made sure they would never be used to harm another living soul again.”

“What has been done to you is a cosmic crime, and we cannot undo it,” Verdandi finished, and her voice sounded like a tree branch tapping against a window, like dread and nerves. “But we can give you another chance.”

“No need,” he said again, glancing between the three of them and suddenly recalling—or, perhaps, having the information put into his mind—that they all were the same woman, just at different ages. It made him shudder at the thought of his consciousness being split across three bodies, knowing everything that had happened, was going to happen, was already happening, and _could_ happen. “I have had my fill of second chances.”

“Is there any harm in looking?” Urd asked.

Of course there was. Loki had spent his entire life _looking_ into places he knew he shouldn’t and he had always paid the price. But, of course, given that he had always looked...damn him and damn them and damn the world. He stepped up next to the well and glanced between the three of them and then turned his gaze down, down, down, into the dark.

He fell.

He hated falling.

They landed in another room, somehow even deeper inside the Tree, and Loki glowered as the three of them appeared in front of him while he clambered to his feet, briskly brushing his clothes free of dirt with his hands. The Norns all waited until he was glowering at them before they each drew a peculiar shape in the air and then three doors appeared behind them. Oh, how _boring._

Loki stepped forward regardless, clasping his hands behind his back.

“Three choices,” Urd said.

“What trick is this?” Loki asked.

“You will have a chance to look at all three of them,” she continued, “but you will only be able to pick one.”

“This is the past,” Verdandi picked up, motioning to the door Urd had created. It opened silently and a whirl of cold air and snow came into the room. They moved aside so Loki could peer past them and see the cold, dreadful expanse of Jotunheim. He could see a few Jotnar and then an Aesir, but before he could see who it was, the door closed.

Then she pointed one long, skeletal finger at the middle door. “The now,” Verdandi said, and the door opened.

Asgard, as it had been. He didn’t quite know what she meant by _now_ , given that it was Asgard as it had been many centuries ago, but he supposed time passed very differently for beings such as the Norns. Loki took a step closer but the door shut, and then the third door opened.

“The will-be,” Verdandi finished, and Loki watched as his past self, young and trying to hide his terror and the Scepter still uncomfortable in his hand, readied himself to step through the portal created by the Tesseract. He was about to go to Midgard in Thanos’s stead, and he could raze the realm to the ground.

“You would go back as you are now,” Skuld told him. “We would not take away what was already stolen. The Loki of then would be absorbed into you and for all others, nothing would change. But you would have a chance to go back.”

Three impossible chances to go back, to _fix_ it all. Loki looked at his younger self for a long moment until the final door closed, and he stepped back until he felt a bit more comfortable with the space between them, mind racing. All three doors were impossible chances to start over, to right his wrongs, to go to the very start and wrench everything broken back into place. He could change everything.

“The rules?” Loki asked, voice hoarse.

He did not miss the smiles the Norns all exchanged between themselves, and then Verdandi said, “You may enter each door, but only once, and for no longer than 24 hours. You will be a specter and unable to change anything that happens. A door will appear at 23 hours and you will have an hour to exit through it, and if the door disappears, then you will be absorbed into the Loki that exists in that world and you will be unable to leave.”

“And this timeline will…” he trailed off, already fairly certain of the answer, and the Norns all nodded in unison.

Before any of them said anything, Loki strode forward and opened the middle door, and stepped through the doorway.

Asgard had always been the most beautiful place he had ever seen, and that had not changed, even many centuries in the past, or however the Norns meant for time to pass. He knew by some measure of how old he had been at this time, and went in search of his counterpart, soon finding him and Thor sharing breakfast in Loki’s private chambers.

The Thor and Loki of this world did not exist in the same way Loki remembered these years being. They were comfortable with one another, trusting, and even though Odin still kept them at one another’s necks with his competition for the two of them to be King, they were still at the stage where they both believed that however it would turn out, it did not entirely matter as long as they were together, and they would be together. Now that Loki _remembered_ , he remembered that there had been versions of him that had not felt they belonged on their knees before Thor, that there had been iterations of him, perhaps even more than the other, that had lived on their feet.

Loki stood by the two brothers, the two of them surely no older than 600, and watched. Thor had always been protective of him, no matter the life, and Loki had always strained against it while simultaneously enjoying it. He’d always been duplicitous, even to himself; he had often sought out things only to push against them when he received them, and he supposed he was lucky in that Thor accepted him regardless and even when Thor did not understand, he still tried when no one else in their lives tried.

His head hurt as he watched them. He still had not quite reconciled the fact that the same Thor that prodded Loki to eat when he merely pushed the food on his plate around was the same Thor that nearly 1000 years later would trap him in a spell so vast and cruel that when it ended, Loki would be spat out, feeling half digested and chewed up, both barely himself and far more than he had ever been.

“You must eat,” Thor pressed him, even switching their plates around so Loki could pick at Thor’s plate instead of his own. Loki had always had a predilection for eating off of Thor’s plate instead of his own and Thor had no qualms about taking advantage of that when Loki went through his melancholies and either forgot to or did not want to eat. “What is it, brother?”

Loki shuddered at the term of endearment even as his younger self let out a sigh and peeked up at Thor through his hair. It was shorter, just over chin-length, and he needed to redye it as there were a few strands of red beginning to come through the black. Loki did not remember this breakfast, if it had even actually happened and not a creation of the Norns, but it felt real enough.

“I must attend to my studies,” Loki finally said, pushing his plate away as he abruptly pushed to his feet. Thor caught his wrist and tugged Loki a bit closer, their knees bumping together.

“Take the day,” Thor implored, Loki narrowing his eyes at him. It was usually Loki pushing Thor to abandon their studies, usually Loki coming up with some grand adventure for the two of them or some scheme that ended poorly because Thor had a habit of not listening and rushing in. “A Prince of Asgard cannot take a day to spend with his brother?”

A smile tugged at the corners of Loki’s mouth and he tried to rub them away, but Thor caught his other wrist in one massive hand as well. Loki still trusted him enough to not tug himself away and merely let Thor hold him, always assured of his safety in Thor’s hands. 

Could he live like this? Could he _trust_ Thor? He had locked Thor in a cage in the Soul World and left him to rot in a world that would torture him and he would experience the exquisite passage of every single second in there. Could Loki do that and then turn around and believe that Thor, _any_ Thor, had his best intentions at heart? Could he _be_ this Loki? Could he—

He already knew the answer. Of course he could not.

But watching would not hurt anything.

He had always been the type to look, after all.

Thor cajoled Loki into going on a hunt with him in the forest and Loki snuck them past the Einherjar posted at their door and past their tutors and out into the woods. The two of them walked, hand in hand, while Loki wove a tale about their last battle against Jotunheim, where the two of them had slaughtered more than their fair share of Jotnar. Loki did not remember this exact moment in time but he knew this Loki knew that there was something wrong about him, something different, but he had not known, not ever even guessed that he could’ve been one of the beasts he had been brought up to hate so dearly. 

Had he truly never wondered? Had he truly never even had a twinge that he was meant to belong on Jotunheim? Had he never _known?_

Of course he hadn’t. Loki had sometimes had the thought that he’d been exchanged at birth for Thor’s true brother, for the brother he deserved, someone who would fight alongside him and was just as strong and brave as him, not Loki with his seidr and his tricks and his schemes. He’d often thought that he did not belong, that there was something very, very wrong with him, but it never would have occurred to him that he had been stolen and his very being had been changed.

Loki knew he could not live with pretending he did not know the truth. How could he? He was nauseous at the thought. But instead of calling for the door, he hung back and watched as Loki pulled out a picnic basket and blanket from a pocket dimension and Thor spread them out in a small, sun-drenched clearing. The two of them shared a few glasses of wine and Loki picked through some of the bread and cheese and meat and nibbled on it. Thor dragged over a rock and they draped their capes over it and leaned against it, one of Thor’s arms slung over Loki’s shoulders. Loki tucked into his side and let his eyes flutter shut. Thor smiled down at him and brushed a kiss over the top of Loki’s head, tipping their heads together.

Oh.

_Oh._

They always came together, didn’t they. In this world or the next, Thor and Loki were meant to be together. Even when Thor and Frigga did not manipulate their lives and souls and tie them together, they were meant for one another. One could not exist without the other; they were light and dark, thunder and lightning, and perhaps not good and evil, but two halves of a whole. Of course, Loki had purposefully turned away from that and made his own destiny. He had killed Thor instead of belonging to him. But perhaps...perhaps it would harm nothing if he watched, if he glimpsed a bit into what could’ve been.

Perhaps that’s what the Norns wanted him to see—how things could’ve been, how he could make them. He could step into this Loki’s life as easily as anything. He could take his place, curled up against Thor’s side, trusting and sure of himself and his place in the world.

He knew he wouldn’t but Loki did consider it. He thought about trusting Thor again. He thought about curling up next to him and tipping his head up and Thor gently kissing him, cradling his face in his hands like he was something precious. He thought about Thor without his plots and plans and his two-faced schemes and every single thing he did to control and ruin Loki’s life. He thought about Thor as he had been, before.

He felt sick with all of it and turned away from the brothers curled together in the warm sun.

“Let me out,” he rasped, calling to the Norns. “I don’t want to be here.”

The door appeared and Loki did not look back as he walked through.

The three Norns watched him as he took a deep breath and steadied himself. He looked between the three of them and considered what he was going to do next. He could attempt to leave, he knew, but he doubted it would happen, and he did rather wish to know what exactly was behind the two other doors.

Oh, damn them and damn himself.

Loki turned away from them and went through the first door and into the cold wilds of Jotunheim.

He could feel that it was cold but was not cold himself, although he did manage to conjure up a warm fur to wrap around himself just to keep the chill out of his bones. Over the wind, he could hear fighting, and in between flurries of snow, he could see three tall Jotnar and then two Aesir, and so he moved closer, walking over the snow like it was not even there. He made quick work of it and soon came upon the battle, only to see that it was Odin against Laufey, Helblindi, and Byleistr, along with a small Jotun with long, curled horns above long black hair and seidr-green eyes.

Ah. So this was...this was a world in which Odin had never stolen him away from Jotunheim, then. This was as it should’ve been, the Loki he could’ve been if Odin had not been so cruel and had not stolen an infant from a temple after a battle he did not need to fight, much less win. 

“Give it back!” this Loki yelled, the blue of his skin standing out in stark relief against the cold and white of the world around him. Bright green seidr was boiling up in between his hands as he shouted, “Give back the Casket, Odin, or I will rip it out of Asgard myself!”

Odin laughed at him, lifting Gungnir and pointing the tip of the spear at them. “You?” he repeated mockingly. “Laufey’s runt eldest son? What can _you_ do to Odin Allfather, _sma-tharmar?_ ”

Loki smiled at that, baring long, sharp teeth behind black lips and black gums. He conjured up a spear of his own and motioned for his family to stand back, which they all did warily.

“Kill him,” Byleistr hissed from behind him, Laufey shaking his head at him and motioning for him to be quiet. “He deserves it, Father.”

“Your father attempted to use the Casket on Midgard,” Odin spat out. “He wanted to enslave the humans and—”

“We wished for more farmland!” Laufey boomed. “You cut off every one of our trade routes and forced every other Realm to destroy their peace agreements with Jotunheim. We were forced to either attempt to move to Midgard or _die_ , and then you forced our hand!”

Before Odin could say anything to that, Loki slammed the butt of his spear onto the ground and sent out a shockwave of seidr. Time and space rended around them and Odin collapsed back into the tear before it closed behind him. The last they saw of him was the look of shock and fear on his face, and then as his family was frozen in shock behind him, Loki moved forward and picked up Gungnir off the ground, holding it up as he looked curiously at it.

“You did it,” Helblindi breathed out, moving forward to roughly pat Loki’s back. Loki ducked away from him and glared up at him, but broke into laughter a moment later.

Laufey hauled Loki up into the air and settled his son onto his shoulder. He crowed out Loki’s name and told his other sons they were going to have a celebration in Loki’s honor, which had Helblindi and Byleistr running past them and towards the palace, already planning out how they were going to sneak alcohol.

Loki carefully followed this version of himself and Laufey as they moved quickly and surely back towards civilization. He already knew that Loki was going to try to leverage Gungnir against the Casket of Ancient Winters and Loki had no real faith it would work, knowing Odin as he did. But it was a fairly impressive plan, if he was being honest with himself; Gungnir held a good amount of the Allfather’s powers and while Odin would not be less powerful, per se, he would tire more easily and would be less focused, especially given that Loki did know he never made a habit of practicing his seidr without the spear.

Odin was the Allfather for a reason, of course, given that he was remarkably powerful, but he was old and set in his ways, even in this peculiar alternate timeline. But Loki wasn’t there for Odin; he was there for the way his alternate self leaned against Laufey’s head and curled one small hand around one of his massive horns. Every few steps, Laufey reached up to gently touch Loki’s side, as if making sure he was still there, and he watched and felt a bit silly for how emotional it made him feel.

The walk back to the palace was long but they made quick time, and Helblindi and Byleistr had already gotten a few servants to put together a small feast of rare fish and warmed ale. Laufey gently put Loki down before they entered the palace and bent down to murmur something in his ear that had Loki reaching up to hug him, wrapping his arms around Laufey’s neck.

Not that Loki had been considering inserting himself into a life where he barely knew those around him—he and Byleistr had something approaching a brotherly relationship, and Laufey had attempted to reach out to him, along with Helblindi—but he could not take this away from this version of himself. He could not steal this freely given approval and affection from any version of himself.

Laufey and Loki separated and Laufey gently brushed away a tear from Loki’s small face. Loki gave him a small smile and then turned away from Laufey to put a spell over Gungnir before they went inside the palace, to the cheer of Loki’s brothers.

Loki followed. He hung back a bit as Helblindi and Byleistr put together a few chairs and a couch and a low table and then brought over the food and drink. Loki ducked into another room and Loki followed to see himself moving quickly down a long hallway and then opening a small door at the far end. It was a set of rooms, with a front parlor and then a sitting room and a bedroom, along with a massive bathroom, all scaled down for a Jotun of Loki’s size. Loki changed into a more decorative loincloth and then put on more jewelry.

Loki smiled to see that even in this very different life, he still had the same taste in jewelry.

Loki looked around his rooms and then picked up Gungnir from where he’d dropped it on his bed. He then created an exact duplicate of the spear and hid the original in a secret compartment underneath the floorboards, sealing it with ice seidr. Loki watched in interest as Loki fiddled with the replica for a minute and then cast his gaze around the room, frowning.

Loki murmured a spell to reveal anything or anyone hidden near him and glowered around the room when nothing appeared. Loki hid his own sigh of relief when his counterpart did not see him; this Loki was near him in age but would never be as powerful as him, much less be able to see through a spell cast by the Norns.

Someone knocked on the door to Loki’s rooms in a peculiar fashion and he brightened up, abandoning the spell and grabbing Gungnir before he rushed through his rooms to wrench the door open. An unfamiliar Jotun was bent over to peer in and they caught Loki up in their hands and then gently hugged him as he rushed out of the room.

“Aegir!” Loki exclaimed, sounding far happier than Loki had imagined he could sound. “You came!”

“I would not miss it,” Aegir replied, tenderly rubbing his cheek against the side of Loki’s head. His voice sounded like waves crashing on the beach. “Oh, little one, you have been so far from me.”

“I missed you,” Loki told him. “When are you going to move to the palace?”

Aegir chuckled as he pulled back a bit from the Prince. “When will you move to the sea with me?”

Loki’s gaze dropped and he just shook his head. He fiddled with one of the long, delicate necklaces around his neck and then held up the replica Gungnir. “We are one step closer to having the Casket returned to us,” he told Aegir, who finally straightened up completely, his huge horns nearly brushing the high ceiling, and turned back down the hall to take Loki back to the small celebration. Loki tugged to be let down and Aegir held him close for a few long moments and then gently set him down, wrapping one of Loki’s small, delicate hands in one of his huge ones. “When the Casket is returned to us, I will create a sea for you outside the palace and you will never have to leave me again.”

Aegir smiled fondly down at him. “If that is what my Prince wants of me,” he teased, pushing open the door for Loki, who stuck his chin into the air and stalked past him to show off Gungnir to his family. Laufey and Aegir warmly greeted one another as Byleistr exclaimed over the spear. Helblindi teased Loki over his mate showing up and Loki flushed a lovely shade of light purple as he tried to keep his eyes from going back to the tall Jotun talking to their father.

Loki watched from the shadows, beyond stunned. How could the Norns expect him to take this life from himself? This Loki was _happy_ , fulfilled in life, supported by his family and clearly in love. He watched as Laufey and Aegir sat next to each other on the couch and Loki climbed up in between them, tucked against Aegir’s side but still close to his father, and Helblindi and Byleistr took the chairs across from them, the five of them talking about Laufey’s upcoming retirement and Loki’s crowning.

He could not...he couldn’t take this from Loki. He barely knew the Byleistr and Helblindi and Laufey of his own time, let alone these three complete strangers. And Aegir, whoever he was? Loki had never even heard of him. He could not live here, could not pretend to be this Loki with love of hearth and home and family, not when his heart belonged elsewhere. He could not slot into this other Loki’s life without being reminded every day of what he had left behind and what he had taken from his own self.

But he watched as their small, private celebration lasted deep into the night, where Loki drank enough sweet red wine to drown a lesser Jotun and ate enough fish to bloat out his stomach. He and Aegir got handsy enough to the point where Laufey finally had to order them to bed, and Loki followed behind as Aegir bowed to the King, laughing, and then gently escorted Loki to his quarters.

Aegir had quarters down the hall from Loki and when he tried to do the proper thing and put Loki to bed by himself, Loki tugged him down and whispered something in his ear that had Aegir blushing and then taking Loki to his own quarters. Loki followed behind and watched as Aegir gently and carefully undressed the Prince, massive hands unclasping the miniscule clasps of his necklaces and bracelets and then gently putting the jewelry aside on a table. Loki kept trying to kiss him and Aegir resisted him until he got the last ring off of Loki’s fine-boned fingers.

Loki didn’t stay to see what happened next. Not that he had ever been one concerned with others privacy but he found himself uncomfortable watching this different version of himself do anything in bed. He did find himself a bit curious about how the size difference would work—Aegir was at least twice Loki’s size—but didn’t feel the need to invade this Loki’s privacy any more than he already had. He wished this iteration of himself good luck and hoped he would never have to meet Thor, even though he knew that both of them would become Kings of their respective realms and would serve on the High Council together and Loki would return Jotunheim to her proper glory, and then he called for the door.

It appeared but Loki took a moment for himself to rush down the hall to find Laufey again. He did not quite understand the urge but he wished to see the Jotun who had once been his father as he was meant to be. Laufey was alone, sitting on the couch and staring at the replica of Gungnir on the table in front of him.

Loki stopped and just looked at him. Laufey was huge, with massive, curling horns and dark red eyes and that distinctive blue skin that still filled Loki with a faint bit of nausea. He wanted to apologize, he found. He wanted to tell this version of his birth father that he should not have suffered, that he deserved more and better than had what been handed to him, but Loki knew he wouldn’t be able to hear. This Laufey did not look as tired or as worn as the Laufey Loki knew, but he was still old, older than Odin, and he looked ready to give Loki the throne.

He was happy for them. He genuinely was. He wanted to...he didn’t know what he wanted to do. Loki looked at Laufey one last time and then went back to the door, and he glanced at Aegir and Loki curled together in bed one last time before going through the door. It felt like a weight lifted off his shoulders at the door shut heavily behind him and Loki met the gazes of the three Norns across the room.

One door left. Loki felt off-kilter already and knew the last door would make the feeling even worse, but he knew he had to play their game to finally go back home where he belonged. And, of course, he was curious. None of the three said anything so he strode to the final door and wrenched it open, stepping out into the Sanctuary, looking up at Thanos, towering over him in his throne.

The alternate version of himself was pretending he didn’t want to cower away and had both of his hands clasped around the Scepter, glaring up at the Mad Titan. The Black Order were all gathered around Thanos’s throne as various Chitauri finished the portal that would take him to Midgard.

There was a long, curving flight of stairs from Thanos’s throne down to the rock where Loki would open the door to Midgard. Loki remembered this, of course he did, and he remembered what came next. He had experienced pain in his life, pain that had felt like it would send him mad, and it had all been absolutely _nothing_ compared to what Thanos and his Order had done to him. He could barely imagine how it could be worse. But he was still Loki and he refused to show weakness, so he gave Thanos a sweeping bow and flowery promises and then followed the Other down to the door.

The Other threatened him and Loki thought he managed to hide his fear, but as he watched it now, he knew that all of the Order and the Chitauri knew he was shaking in his boots. He had thought he had known what agony was, what strife was, what suffering was...he had been so sheltered, in the very grand scheme of things. He had thought he had known pain but what had he known? Pain of betrayal from Odin? Pain from all of Asgard treating him as lesser than his brother? Pain from his own machinations backfiring on him? Oh, yes, he had suffered, but nothing like what Thanos had done to him, would do to him. But he knew what was going to happen next and he was as prepared as he could be.

If anyone could run and stay one step ahead of Thanos, it was Loki. Ebony Maw had been in every corner of his mind, had examined every single thought and wrenched every memory out of his head and picked through it all until Loki had been sobbing and pleading for his life on the ground, but Maw had not found the locked box hidden in the deepest depths of Loki’s mind. Maw had not found the very thing that would be his downfall; Loki knew that for certain because if he had found it, Loki knew he would be dead. Sometimes death seemed preferable, but Loki was capable of many things, and taking his own life was not one of them. He would rather suffer for eternity than end his life.

The Other left and Loki stood alone.

He sucked in a thin, trembling breath, knew he could do nothing about the scuffs on his armor, and resettled his cape on his shoulders and slid his horned helm into a pocket dimension. There was nothing to do about his hair or the various wounds all over his body or the peculiar fog in his mind, but he allowed himself a moment to try and gather himself together. Just one moment before he changed everything. One moment before he went to Midgard and would have to face Thor and all he had wrought. One moment before the end.

He opened the door.

Loki followed himself through the portal.

This version of himself allowed himself to be captured and taken in for interrogation. He even gave up the Scepter, although Loki had a suspicion it was not the real Scepter. But his eye was caught on Clint, who _did not know him._

He remembered Clint telling him that being bound to him without being known was far worse than not being his at all. Could he live like that? Could he live with knowing that Clint did not know him at all?

Loki knew the answer, of course, but he was curious. They restrained Loki and frog-marched him off to an interrogation room, where Clint hung back in the observation room with Coulson and Fury. An anonymous agent was sent in to interrogate Loki, but he did not even pay attention to them, picking at his nails with barely shaking hands. Loki floated in between his counterpart and this alternate Clint, unable to decide which one he should be paying attention to. Fury ended up calling the agent out of the room after a few hours, and both Loki’s looked up to see the door open again and Captain America came into the room, dressed to the nines in his gaudy uniform. He wasn’t carrying his shield, which was smart, but Loki’s mouth curled in an amused smile for a moment before he reached up to brush it off and he straightened up in his chair.

Captain America glowered at him. Loki smiled at him, baring his teeth.

“The man out of time,” Loki rasped. “How very kind of you to grace me with your presence.” His green eyes turned to the one-way mirror behind Steve and Loki knew he was looking directly at Fury. “Well, come then, ask your questions.”

“Why are you here?”

“Surely you can see it is not out of my own free will.”

“On _Earth_ ,” Steve clarified pointedly. “What was your goal when you came through that portal?”

“World domination, of course,” Loki replied pleasantly, and then Loki floated through the one-way mirror to look at Clint. He remembered using Selvig to search through the SHIELD files to find the perfect henchmen, and Clint had stood out to him as being absolutely perfect as his right hand man. He’d been right, of course, and when wasn’t he? He was curious if this version of him had not done that, or if he was merely waiting for his chance.

They all looked up as thunder echoed through the building and Loki’s face tightened immediately. He hunched in on himself and then seemed to realize what he was doing and straightened up again, casting a wary eye to the ceiling even though he couldn’t see anything. Loki turned to Clint, who was frowning at Loki through the glass, forehead creased in something approaching concern. Clint would never really change, would he? It was refreshing.

He hoped this version of him would have Clint in his life. Loki couldn’t imagine living without him.

As expected, Thor crashed into the room soon after. He ignored Steve’s exclamation of surprise and the way Loki stiffened and then flinched away from him as he swept Loki up in his arms, holding his brother close to his chest.

“I thought you dead, brother,” Thor gasped out. “I thought you lost to me.”

This version of himself was not able to resist the feeling of safety he still found in Thor’s arms and slumped into Thor’s chest, long fingers digging into his armor. Loki moved closer and sighed at the way Loki’s eyes squeezed shut when Thor’s arms tightened around him.

Once again, how could he take this Loki’s place? How could he take this from him? How could he step into this alternate version of himself and pretend to not have changed, to be the same? He was Loki, a being of change; how could he be this version of himself when he had already long moved past it? 

He did not understand what the Norns wished for him to do. Did they believe he would willingly go to the past when he had spent so much time moving forward? Did they believe he would leave behind all he had gained to start over, when he did not wish to start over to begin with? He’d had his fill of second chances, of starting over. Thor had done enough of that for the both of them.

Loki did not quite pay attention as Loki quietly explained that Thanos had found him and was forcing him to attempt to invade Earth, but he had managed to send a signal to Heimdall to alert him before he had gone through the portal. He wanted nothing to do with Midgard but had been given no choice. All he wished for was to go home.

“We would have stopped you,” Steve spoke up.

Loki let out a dry chuckle. “You? A man with a shield? The man out of time? You are nothing in the face of one such as me. You are an ant and I am a boot.”

Steve glared at him but didn’t say anything, listening as Loki continued to tell his tale of woe to Thor.

Loki did not understand. Where did this trust come from? Where did this faith in _Thor_ , of all Aesir, come from? Who was this Loki that looked at his brother and knew that he would believe him? Thor had not believed a word out of Loki’s mouth in decades, much less a fanciful tale such as this. But Thor did not say anything other than to reassure Loki that he was listening and that he believed him. Who inhabited his skin to say these things? Who was this Loki?

But he waited and listened, and eventually, Steve sighed. “Alright,” he told Thor. “That’s enough. I believe him, and we have enough information to go on. He doesn’t need to be in here anymore.”

Loki knew what his counterpart was doing. He would sic Thor and Asgard’s armies upon Thanos and vanish with the Scepter—and, if he was wily enough, the Tesseract—in the midst of battle. Perhaps, once he knew Thanos was good and dead, he would let Thor find him in a dozen years. But every Loki knew how to manipulate others to fight his battles for him, and every Loki also knew that Thor was ready and willing to fight those battles for him. Of course, unless Loki killed him, but how often did that happen?

Enough that Loki refused to return to a life where Thor was part of it.

Thor managed to cajole Fury and Steve into letting Loki go, although he did have to stay restrained, and they transported him to Stark Tower, where the rest of the Avengers devised a plan of their own in Stark’s penthouse. Loki offered up as much information as he was able and stayed near Thor, generally trying to keep Thor in between him and the rest of the Avengers.

Loki watched Clint. He barely paid attention to his counterpart; he missed his archer so fiercely that it made his chest hurt. He wondered how long it had been since he had killed Thanos, how long they had been separated. But Clint had no connection to the Loki of this world, which meant he considered him nothing more than a potential threat to Midgard and his way of life. How was Loki meant to be Loki-without-Clint when he had already been Loki-with-Clint? How could he live?

Or Steve? How was he meant to be Loki-without-Steve when existence did not feel like it had meaning without him? Who was meant to temper him or calm him? Who was left to push him down when all he wanted to do was explode? In what life could he live without his Captain?

His eyes turned to Steve, who was predictably arguing with Stark, and Loki wondered how the Norns had thought he would choose to live in a world where he did not have either of the men closest to his heart. How was he meant to live in a world without his husband, without his guard? Leaving the two of them behind was tantamount to leaving behind parts of himself. He could not move on when he had spent so much time and energy loving the two of them.

If he chose to live in this world, he would not have the men that made him whole. What was life worth living without those he loved? This was his husband who did not love him, and how could Loki live without that? This was Clint who did not know him. This was Tony who did not consider Loki a bit of a pest, this was Natasha who did not thoroughly detest him for very good reason, this was Bruce who grudgingly respected him and would always refuse to admit it. This was Thor who had not yet hurt him but Loki could never trust him again.

This was a version of him that still loved this brother, and Loki could not take that away from him.

This Loki had been betrayed, fiercely and absolutely, but he had not yet lost everything.

He _thought_ he had lost everything at this point, but he knew nothing. There was so much yet to come, and Loki could not interfere with that. This version of him, whether he was real or not, had to live his life as it would come to him. Perhaps this action would change future events to the point where he would never completely lose faith in Thor. Perhaps this would change both of their futures. Perhaps this would lead him to a place that Loki, as he was now, would not even recognize him.

But for now, as Loki looked at Steve, who did not know him and would never know him the way Loki needed him to, and then at Clint, the absolute love of his life, he could not put himself into a life where neither of them knew him. He could not turn back to Thor when he knew what could be, when he would always know what could have been, what should have been. He could not care for his oaf of a brother when he knew that Steve and Clint were both better and greater than him, when he always knew he would be incomplete without Steve and Clint.

He did not even wait to see what happened. He called for the door and went through it without looking back.

Loki shut the final door behind him and looked at the three Norns, clasping his hands behind his back as he thought.

“How many?” he finally rasped out. “How many iterations did Thor drag me through?”

It took a moment before Skuld replied, “84,109.”

He physically stumbled back, one hand going to his chest, feeling his heart pound against his palm. He could not even _fathom_ of how many thousands of years it had taken for Thor to ultimately kill him that many times. What kind of _power_ did it take—

“You knew,” Loki spat. “You _knew_. You knew what Thor intended to do with me and you allowed him, for over _eighty thousand_ revolutions, for him to use your Stones and steal my seidr and let him do all the disgusting things he did to me in the dark—my brother _raped_ me and you believe I would want to return to him? Any version of him?” Loki shook his head, crossing his arms over his chest. “You _owe_ me, Norns. You let him do this to me. Every version of you, if there even are different versions of you. I will go through none of the doors. Return me to my life or I will tear down Yggdrasil myself. You know I am plenty powerful enough.”

“The only options are the doors,” Urd told him in her rattling voice. “You either choose one of the doors or you stay.”

“You truly wish to be stuck with me forever?” he retorted archly. He was Loki of Asgard, Prince and mage to King Balder, husband to Steve Rogers, and he would not let fate dictate his future when he had spent so long forging his own path. “I will not go through any of the doors,” he told them. “I will go home to my husband and to my friends. I am not Loki if I do not have the people that I care about, and none of those people are in any of the lives you showed me.”

“You can make those same relationships,” Verdandi offered up. “They will come to care about you again, just as you desire.”

“There were over 84,000 iterations that Thor dragged me through,” Loki spat back, “and Steve and I fell in love in only one of them. I am unwilling to take that risk again. You will either return me to the timeline I left or I will leave by force.”

Skuld stepped forward. She was so very small, just a child to his eye, but Loki knew just how powerful she was. But he also knew that they were well aware of what he was capable of, and powers like the Norns had no desire to risk their powers or lives for one Aesir. He was Loki, after all, and what could stand between him and his goals? He knew it was not them.

“The only options are the doors,” Urd informed him, but she was unsure.

“You offered me a boon for the atrocities you _allowed_ to happen to me,” Loki snarled in return. “You watched as the seidr from your own Stones warped his mind and made him rationalize raping me. You watched as he killed me over and over, as he ripped my soul and seidr from my body and reinserted it into a new version of me, as he did that _thousands_ of times, and then you expect me to accept you doing the same to me? You ask for me to want it?” He shook his head. “You must not know me as well as you believe, Norns of the Nine, for I am Loki, and none tell me what to do.”

Seidr swirled around the room as Loki stared them down. The Norns watched the destiny of Aesir and guided few of them into the destiny they were meant. They had seen what Thor had done to Loki and thought of him that he would want to start over and not return to the life he had made for himself. Perhaps they were not as all-seeing and omniscient as they believed. But Loki would no longer allow anyone, even the Norns, to decide his destiny for him. They had not stepped in while Thor had committed great acts of harm against his being and now they thought they could dictate the rest of his life? He would not stand for it.

“If we returned you to your life, you would consider your boon repaid?” Skuld finally asked, tipping her head back to look up at him. 

“I would consider it thanks for killing the Mad Titan and no more than I deserve,” he replied, trying not to keep his tone short and annoyed.

Skuld nodded and held up a small hand when Verdandi and Urd made to speak. Her large eyes searched his face and Loki fought to keep the frown off his face as he looked at her in return. “Then consider your boon repaid, Loki of Asgard,” she told him, and reached out a hand. Loki turned his head to see the three doors behind him disappear and one massive door reappear a moment later in their place. He made to step towards it but hesitated.

“This is the world where Steve Rogers is my husband?” he questioned of them. “Where Balder is King of Asgard and Thor is dead and...and Clint Barton is mine?”

“It is the world you left,” Skuld told him, and Loki did not look at the Norns again as he opened the final door and stepped through.


	3. part three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Loki returns home.

The door shut behind him and disappeared as he stepped out, again, to the grass in front of Clint’s house. Loki glanced around, frowning at how everything still looked just a little off, and then he turned his attention to his rumpled clothes, smoothing them down with his hands. He paused for a moment, taking a deep breath, trying to cease the trembling of his heart. He hadn’t quite thought that would work; he’d been fairly sure that the Norns would have forced his hand. But he was plenty powerful enough to pose a threat to them, so surely they had not wished to risk it. But what a peculiar thing to happen. Perhaps it had been their version of a kindness; a choice after having so many taken from him.

But he so did hate having others make choices for him. Why fight for a future only to choose a different one?

He took a moment to enjoy the familiar air and the slight breeze upon his face, the blue of the sky above him.

The porch door slammed, and Loki looked up to see Clint running down the porch steps and across the front lawn. He smiled and opened his arms as Clint slammed into him, fingers clawing underneath his tunic and underclothes to dig into his skin. Loki gently wrapped his arms around his archer, holding him close.

_Pet,_ he murmured. _I have missed you._

There was no response.

Loki frowned, fingers glancing over Clint’s back, and he straightened up. Carefully, Loki slid his hands over Clint’s back, feeling his vertebrae jut up against his fingers, and then up over his ribs to his thin, bony shoulders. Clint’s face was pressed up against Loki’s chest, making soft, pained sounds in the back of his throat, but he didn’t fight as Loki cupped his sharp jaw and tipped his head back so Loki could get a good look at him.

He looked _awful_. He was close to emaciated, bones jutting out from underneath his sallow, sunken skin, mouth dry and cracked, his teeth yellowed, his hair long and greasy and uncared for. Loki’s fingers shook as he gently brushed his fingers over Clint’s cheekbone and down over his jaw.

“What has been done to you?” Loki asked, eyes catching on the purple hearing aids in Clint’s ears. “Did someone do this to you?”

Clint shook his head, eyes fluttering shut. He sagged into Loki’s grasp, apparently not even caring if he stayed standing, and Loki took his weight as one of Clint’s thin hands caught one of his. Loki carefully clasped their hands, heart sinking in his chest as he saw the new scars on Clint’s forearms.

“How long has it been?”

Clint continued to not say anything, and Loki’s eyes were only torn away from him when he heard the porch door open and slam shut again. He looked up to see Bucky walking quickly towards him. He looked peculiar and different as well—his hair was short, and something was different about his face, and, perhaps the most strange, his left arm was no longer seidr but instead some peculiar black metal threaded with gold.

What on Midgard was going on?

“Bucky,” Loki greeted, voice strained. Bucky shook his head, face tight and pinched, and he wrapped his arms around Loki’s neck and hugged him tight.

“It’s good to see you,” Bucky told him as he stepped back, roughly rubbing his metal hand over his face. “I didn’t think you were coming back.”

“Coming back?” Loki repeated incredulously. “Come back from where?”

“It’s been six months,” Bucky told him, blue eyes falling to Clint. He sounded just as awful as Clint looked.

“Six months?” Loki repeated, shaking his head. “It is not possible I was gone for six months. It was a few days at most.”

Was this retribution from the Norns? Did they send him forward in time? How long had he spent inside the Soul Stone? Was this some play of Thor’s—

Loki looked down as he felt Clint shaking his head against his chest. His heart sunk in his chest. The proof of his absence was in front of him. No human could lose so much weight and look so terrible after only a few days or a week. No, this was months and months of neglect. Carefully, gently, Loki reached down and took Clint’s hands in his own. He took a deep breath, trying to catch up with his mind as it reeled. Six months? Six _months?_

Carefully, Loki picked Clint up in his arms and looked to Bucky.

“You’re going to tell me everything.”

Bucky shrugged and waved him towards the house. “Sure. C’mon.”

Loki sat down on the porch swing and conjured up a small cot for Clint, who curled up in it and fell asleep. Bucky ducked into the house and brought out a pitcher of sweet tea, pouring a couple glasses and handing Loki one. He sat down on the rocking chair next to the swing and looked out over the yard. Loki opened a pocket dimension and pulled out a small vial of healing potion, nudging Clint awake and handing it over. Clint blinked up at him and turned away from it, closing his eyes again.

Loki frowned as Bucky sighed. “Yeah, he hasn’t been eating. Good luck with that one.”

Loki took a sip of tea and turned to look at Bucky. “Start talking. _Now._ ”

It took Bucky a few minutes to think about everything and build up the courage. He laid out the basics in a quiet, exhausted voice: killing Thanos broke Thor’s spell. There was a great snap of seidr as the Mad Titan died and it reverberated through the entire galaxy, changing everything to, what they could assume, was the way existence had been before Thor and Frigga’s interference. There wasn’t a single aspect of any of their lives that hadn’t been altered fundamentally.

Not only had he been gone for six months, but to return to this? Loki’s mind spun out and he shook his head, trying to grasp any of it.

“Balder?” Loki asked hurriedly. “I know Thor is still dead, but what else?”

“Yeah, Balder’s still King,” Bucky sighed, “and yeah, Thor’s gone. Good and dead. Don’t need to worry about that. I don’t know everything—Clint and I have been here since pretty much the beginning—but, uh, a lot of shit changed.”

Loki’s eyes fell to Clint, curled up in a ball on the cot, and then he turned to look behind him, through the window that led to the inside of the house. “Where is Laura? The children?”

“They’re gone. Laura and Clint never got married in this reality, which means they didn’t have the kids.”

Oh.

Loki’s gaze dropped to Clint. “Then how do you have the house?”

“Some of us remember what life was like before the change,” Bucky replied. “From what I understand, it’s mostly people who were involved in that final battle against Thanos. So the Avengers all know, um...Balder knows, Sam knows, all of them. Regular people don’t know and I think a lot of their lives stayed the same anyway, but it changed for all of us. So afterwards, since Clint’s help and that potion of yours saved Tony’s life, Pepper found this house and bought it for Clint and he and I have been holed up here ever since.”

Alright. Loki could work with that. “I assume my personal rooms here also disappeared.”

“Yeah. Oh, that’s right, we have a box of your stuff somewhere. Clint knows where it is. He hasn’t let me near it.”

_Good boy,_ Loki said to him, but there was still no response. Loki was starting to worry there never would be. What had Thanos taken from him?

They both looked to Clint, who just looked at both of them and blinked without doing anything. Loki frowned at him and Clint sighed and got up from the cot and sat down on the porch at Loki’s feet, leaning against his legs. Loki slowly reached out and pet his hair, sliding his fingers through the long, greasy strands. Clint let out a deep sigh and settled further against Loki, wrapping one hand around his ankle to make sure he stayed close. The poor thing...Loki could only imagine how he had suffered.

“Anyway,” Bucky sighed, “it’s been rough. But you’re back, so you can help.”

Loki nodded. “Where is everyone?”

“Everyone else? Like the Avengers?” Loki nodded. “Um, Sam is still Captain America, although I haven’t seen him, T’Challa is back in Wakanda...Natasha and the Valkyrie are back in Asgard, Rhodes is pretty much in charge of the Avengers, Scott and Hope are Avengers full time I think, I haven’t seen Stephen Strange since Thanos died—”

“What happened to his corpse? To the bodies of his armies?”

“All taken back to Asgard.” Loki wilted in relief. It would’ve been beyond terrible if SHIELD or any of the governments had gotten their hands on Thanos’s corpse or any alien weapons. Hopefully Clint had his spear. “Balder made sure of it. He took the Gauntlet and the Reality Stone as well. I think the Tesseract is in the box of your stuff that Clint has, but he never let me look in it, so I can’t be sure. But anyway, Tony is in a coma in one of his mansions, I think Rhodes and Pepper are alternating caring for him. I think Banner is staying with him, but like I said, I haven’t seen any of them in six months. Sometimes I get text messages or whatever but I’ve just been...kind of trying to keep Clint alive, really.”

Loki nodded, still reeling. Thanos was _dead_ , how could life have gotten worse? How could they still be fractured when the thing holding them apart was vanquished? What had he _done?_

“What else...you’re still an Avenger, by the way, same as the rest of us. Avengers is still part of Stark’s business, all that stuff is the same. I don’t know too many of the details but you still saved Sokovia and all that.”

“What happened to your arm?”

“The first time or the most recent?”

Loki snorted. “What happened to the arm I created?”

“It disappeared once you did and apparently in the new life, Shuri had already made one for me, so she attached it for me while we were trying to figure everything out.” Bucky extended and retracted the new arm, a few of the inner mechanisms faintly whirring as he moved. Loki tapped his fingers on the top of Clint’s head as he thought.

“Would you like your old arm back? The seidr one, that is.” This was something he could control, something he could help with. It still felt too impossible to be real; he had never even thought that killing Thanos would change anything, would have any effect on the world at large. How had he not even considered it? How had it never even crossed his mind? Now, in retrospect, he had been so blind—of course achieving Thor’s original goal had broken the spell, but how could he have known? He hadn’t even considered it. How stupid of him. And Loki thought himself smart? When he had not even thought of this clear eventuality? More fool him.

Bucky chuckled, holding the metal arm out. “Go for it, man.”

“Not a man,” Loki murmured, opening a pocket dimension and pulling out a small bag of various gems and jewels. He handed it over and Bucky dug through it, pulling out the same black stone he had chosen the first time. He let out a sigh of relief as his fingers closed around it, and then Loki reached forward and placed both hands on Bucky’s metal arm. It took only a few moments to gather seidr and form it into the shape of an arm and replace the metal arm, which detached from Bucky’s shoulder and the new black arm expanded out. Bucky let out a relieved sigh and flexed and rolled his new arm, squeezing the stone and changing it from black to red to green to blue and eventually settling on a faded yellow. Loki frowned down at the metal arm and then shrugged and put it on the floor. He turned his attention back to Clint, who was staring listlessly into space, still leaning against Loki’s leg.

They sat in silence as Loki digested everything.

“Why haven’t you seen Sam?”

Bucky froze. “HYDRA,” he finally muttered, the words sounding as if they’d been torn out of his throat. “They couldn’t decide if the project was a threat or not, so they sent the Winter Soldier to kill one of the two soldiers taking part in the project. I...the Soldier killed Riley, Sam’s friend. Just luck of the draw, I guess. But Sam hasn’t been able to face me since I told him. It’s...it’s like I have two lives in my head. I was barely able to hold it together after you and Shuri got rid of the words but it’s even worse now. And with what Clint has been going through...it’s been rough, Loki. I’m glad you’re back. Where the hell were you, anyway?”

“The Norns took me,” Loki replied with a small, sad smile. “As did the Soul Stone.” Against his leg, Clint stiffened. “I saw Thor in the Soul World and spoke with him, and then spent the rest of the time inside Yggradisl, the World Tree. It was...eventful, to say the least. But I worked very hard to come home.”

“That’s good,” Bucky said. He glanced down at Clint and then leaned in close to Loki. “I don’t know how much longer he would’ve made it, sir.”

“I am home now,” Loki promised him, “and I have no intention of going anywhere.”

“You might want to rethink that promise,” Bucky replied with a tired chuckle, refilling his cup and drinking deeply. “You got a lot of shit to catch up on.”

Loki nodded. He already knew he needed to go to Asgard to talk with Balder, and he also needed to see Tony and see what had changed with the Avengers, as well as perhaps having a talk with Sam, and he needed to talk to Stephen, and figure out what was wrong with Clint, and…

And…

Did he not have a husband? Where was Steve?

“Where is Steve?” he asked. “You did not mention him.”

Bucky gave him a worried look and then turned his head away.

“Where is my husband?”


	4. part four

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Loki learns what has been done.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> mention of suicide attempt cw

Loki spent the next day putting the house back to rights and how he remembered it, and then sent his seidr to work on rebuilding his rooms. He had also put Clint into healing sleep while he figured out exactly what the new timeline had changed and whatever it was Thanos had ripped out of him had done to him. Bucky was proving to be a great help, and was texting with Stephen and Sam, both of whom were going to come by as soon as possible to get Loki up to date. And then, once Loki was certain of his place and everything that was happening on Midgard, he and Clint were going to go find his wayward husband.

According to Bucky, Steve had made sure that Thanos was dead and that everyone was alright, and then he had simply vanished. Loki could still feel their marriage bond, so he knew the Captain was alive, but he was rather busy at the moment and knew Steve could handle himself. He had the Power Stone, after all, along with Mjolnir, and had at least some access to Loki’s seidr, which meant he could travel anywhere in the known galaxy without difficulty. He had asked Heimdall, who had sent down a raven informing him that Steve was nowhere within his sight, so Loki knew that wherever Steve had run, he had run far and with great haste. But Loki would find him, he was certain of it. He merely had a few things to work out before then.

He knew Steve could take care of himself. Clint, on the other hand, could not.

Clint was the problem currently in front of him. If Loki let himself think for too long on the vastness of space, how far Steve could be from him, he knew he would not even know where to start. His heart ached and trembled and his soul ached with unrest, but he could only solve one problem at a time, and there were _so many_ problems before him.

Bucky tapped on the open door to Loki’s rooms before walking in. His arm was dark red again and every so often, he looked at it and smiled a bit, some tension easing out of his shoulders. “Sam told me he’ll be here tonight,” he told Loki, who nodded absently. “What are you doing?”

“I had carvings on these walls,” Loki sighed, tearing his gaze away from the empty walls and back to Bucky, who had dropped onto the couch and was looking at the various Asgardian items Clint had managed to keep a hold of after the change—the Tesseract, the golden snake, his Aesir bow and quiver, the ruby-hilted dagger, some of Loki’s odds and ends that he’d held onto including the bundle of flowers Steve had once given Loki. “I am attempting to decide whether or not I should put them again.”

Bucky shrugged, picking up the ruby-hilted dagger and sliding it out of the sheath. He tossed it up into the air a few times as he said, “Leave ‘em. Hell, maybe you and Steve aren’t even married anymore.”

Loki frowned at him, turning away from the blank walls, and then after thinking about it, he put up more shelves. “Steve and I are still bound,” he replied. “I can feel him. He is very far away, but he is alive, and he is still my husband.”

“Can’t you find him?” Bucky questioned, sitting up straight and giving him a pointed look. His hand tightened around the ruby-hilted dagger.

“It is not quite that simple,” Loki sighed, nudging open the bedroom door to check on Clint and then he joined Bucky on the couch, a bit of seidr animating the golden snake as it moved through his fingers. “We are bound but not in a manner that...facilitates surveillance. No loyalty or fidelity bonds that generally allow one or both members of a bond to find one another. I can...feel him, but when I reach towards him, reach for him, it is as if he has blocked me. I assume this is because I was gone for a very long time and he shut off his part of the bond to keep from feeling the loss. If he did not have the Power Stone, I would worry that he had been forced to close the bond, but there are very, very few beings in any galaxy that could overpower him now, and I cannot imagine Steve would submit easily to any power.”

“Yeah, he’s not the type,” Bucky chuckled fondly. “So he’s alright, though? You can tell that much?”

“I know he is alive,” Loki said. “For now, that is all that matters.” He sighed. “Steve also has access to my seidr, which could make him arguably the most powerful being in the galaxy. I have become...exponentially powerful in these past few years, power unlike any I have ever heard of before. Steve may be one of the few humans I would believe to escape unharmed from accessing the full strength of my seidr.”

“What’s the difference between seidr and magic?”

Loki stopped himself from saying the immediate, acerbic response that came to his lips, and he took a moment to think. “Seidr is intrinsic,” he finally told Bucky. “It is no less a part of me than my bones. It comes from within.” He motioned at his torso and then brushed the tips of his fingers over the space between his eyes, where his seidr was twisted up and powerful. “It is a muscle, I suppose, one that can be grown and strengthened, but each seidrmadr reaches their limit. I had thought I had met mine many, many centuries ago, but recently I have...become more.” He motioned to the sitting room they were currently sitting in. “Even a few years ago, an endeavour of this measure would have exhausted me. It took me an entire day the last time I built the beginnings of this room, but now I have finished and still have energy to begin the process of building the wards around this home. Clint had also been experiencing something similar.” Loki paused for a moment and then gave Bucky a considering look. “Did Stark survive?”

Bucky let out a harsh breath. “He’s been in a coma since Thanos,” he muttered.

“Good,” Loki replied lightly, pleased with himself. His potion had worked, then. Excellent. “Clint saved his life, then. That is only something that could be done by an exceptionally powerful seidrmadr.” He pushed to his feet. “Where is he?”

“Stark? Why would I know?”

Loki rolled his eyes and picked up the Tesseract. He motioned to the dagger in Bucky’s hands. “Clint won’t like you touching that, but if you have need of me, press your finger to the ruby and speak my name. I will hear it and I will come. If Sam or Stephen make it back before I do, tell them to wait. I should not be long.”

Loki disappeared in a puff of blue smoke and Bucky just shook his head at him. Dramatic asshole. He ducked into the bedroom and kicked off his boots and slid on top of the blankets, setting the ruby-hilted dagger on the bedside table before carefully reaching out and taking Clint’s hand. The man was sleeping and didn’t grasp him back, but it made Bucky feel a bit better, and soon enough , he fell asleep into an unrestful doze.

* * *

It did not take Loki very long at all to find Tony Stark. He was in a hospital suite in one of his mansions, which Loki supposed was good, as he knew Steve had once worried about Tony being too attached to his work. He was alone when Loki appeared, standing at the foot of his bed, hands clasped behind his back as he looked down at him.

For all intents and purposes, Tony should be dead. Humans were not meant to funnel seidr through their bodies the way Tony had, but his suit and Clint’s intervention and Loki’s own potions had kept him alive. More pity that, Loki supposed, as he was not fond of the man. But he was useful, and he had been a great assist to them in the battle, and Loki had not wished for anyone’s death.

He would respect the man’s privacy and not enter his mind. But a bit of seidr would not harm him. He wasn’t expecting Stark to suddenly wake up, but the lack of reaction was a bit concerning. Loki made a thoughtful sound and ignored the way the camera in the corner slowly turned to focus on him.

It took only a moment for a voice to come from the speaker in the ceiling, “We thought you were dead.”

“Rhodes, is it?” Loki questioned with a smirk. “I mean your friend no harm. I merely came to see if I could help.”

“Sounds pretty altruistic for you,” Rhodes replied, but then he sighed, the speaker crackling. “I’ll be in the room in a minute. Don’t touch anything.”

Loki reached a hand out and brushed a finger over the railing of the bed, just to be contrary, and he quickly clasped his hands behind his back again as the door to the room slid open. Rhodes stepped in and flicked the light on, crossing his arms over his chest as he glared up at Loki. Something soft and painful flickered over his face when he looked at Tony’s body on the bed, but Loki couldn’t do anything about that.

“I was, unfortunately, indisposed,” Loki replied, conjuring up a chair and taking a seat. He conjured up a chair for Rhodes as well, and the man took it after giving him a suspicious look. “Oh, none of that. We are on the same side now, are we not? Now, if you would be so kind, I have some questions.”

“What makes you think I’ll answer anything?” Rhodes shot back.

Loki opened a pocket dimension and pulled out a vial of heill. He set it on a seidr shelf in the air between them and motioned his head towards it. Rhodes sighed. “I can see you took the two drops of the potion I gave you for your injury,” Loki told him. “You were healed of such a grievous injury with two drops of this potion.”

“You’d give us the entire bottle?”

“Oh, heaven’s no. I don’t need your lot attempting to synthesize it or what have you. I’ll give you...one drop per question you answer to my satisfaction.” Loki popped the cork out of the vial and slid one drop of the potion out onto the tip of his finger. “In a show of good faith, I will give him one drop before you tell me anything.” The drop floated over and slid past Tony’s slack lips, and only a moment later, the man looked a bit more vibrant and one of the various monitors around him that had been letting out intermittent beeps suddenly went quiet, which Loki hoped was a good thing. 

Rhodes gave him a wary look but nodded. “Fine,” he sighed. “What do you want to know?”

“What happened after the battle? All of the information I have currently is from Bucky, and he...he has been busy.”

“Well, Tony’s suit finally failed once he turned off the mist machine. He took some of that potion you made and I think that’s all that kept him from dying.”

“Clint also kept him alive,” Loki interrupted pointedly. “Do not discount his assistance. He helped Tony modify his suit so that he funnel seidr through it to power the mist maker, and Clint is the one who actually harnessed the leylines in order to do so. He is the reason Tony is in that bed and not in a coffin.”

“Yeah, yeah, we all know you’re in love with Barton,” Rhodes replied dismissively, “but—”

“I am not in love with him,” Loki bit out. “Our relationship is—”

“I know,” Rhodes interrupted tiredly. “ _Trust me,_ I get it.” He sighed and motioned vaguely to the space between him and Tony’s bed. “I understand. But let me continue, alright? So he collapsed right after Thanos died. You vanished like right after Thanos hit the ground and then Barton started screaming and Steve managed to get him to the house, and that’s when we all realized that...well, something had changed. Barton’s kids weren’t in the safe house, for one, and his wife wasn’t anywhere to be found, and then we all started kind of...remembering things that hadn’t happened to us. It sent all of us into a tailspin for a few days.

“I know Steve made sure everyone was safe and alive and made sure Barton made it to that house of his, and then he just took off. We’ve searched pretty much every inch of the planet at this point and have satellites examining everywhere and beacons pointed out to space for any hint of the Power Stone, but there hasn’t been anything yet. But we haven’t stopped looking.” Rhodes sighed, looked over Tony on the bed and rubbed a hand tiredly over his face. “How much detail do you want? A lot’s happened.”

“Enough that when I leave Midgard to find Steve, I can be assured I have left this realm in good hands.”

“You consider our hands to be _good_ hands?”

Loki considered that long enough for Rhodes to grow a bit uncomfortable. Finally, he said, “What is important now is that you are doing what you believe best. Are you still War Machine?”

“There’s still the Avengers,” Rhodes told him. “And, yeah, I’ve been going on missions with Cap—uh, Sam. He went through some crap with the United States government about being Captain America but we had a few Stark Industries lawyers set them straight. It’s me, Kate Bishop, Sam, that Parker kid, Wanda, Vision, T’Challa, Romanoff, Banner when he’s not here with Tony, and Scott and Hope. Sam and Romanoff have basically become our leaders, and Carol helps out when she’s in the galaxy. Romanoff spends a lot of her time on Asgard but she helps out when she’s here.”

“Balder?”

“The King? Your brother? Yeah, he went back to Asgard after helping out for a week or so. I think Cap’s been in contact with him. I know their Gatekeeper—what’s his name?”

“Heimdall.”

“Yeah, him. He’s keeping an eye out for Steve and keeping us updated on the big nothing he’s been finding. There’s been...you ever heard of Latveria?”

“Of course not.”

Rhodes chuckled at that. “Of course. Anyway, it’s a small nation in Europe ruled by a King. His name is Victor Doom, but he calls himself Doctor Doom.” Both of Loki’s eyebrows rose. “Yeah, I know. Trust me, we’ve been dealing with this guy for the better part of, what, a year? SHIELD was keeping an eye on him, considers him a threat, but he’s all the way on the other side of the world, and we were kind of busy with the whole Thanos thing. But he has these...robots that he sends on missions. We don’t have legislation for robots yet, they’re still kind of a new thing, especially artificial intelligence robots, so there’s all this murky legal area.” Rhodes sighed. “They’re trying a new Accords.”

“Have you signed it?”

“No,” Rhodes said, and Loki nodded. “The United Nations learned their lesson from the last time, so they’re working with Stark Industries and the Avengers Initiative lawyers on drafting it, but it’s slow going. It’s all sorts of oversight for AI and tech and enhanced humans, but you’ll be glad it’s different than before.”

“You’re aware I will not sign anything.”

Rhodes rubbed a hand over his face. “Yeah, and that’s one of the big worries. I know the UN wants you to sign it; getting an alien to sign something is a pretty big get for them. Barton got that farm of his registered under Asgardian diplomacy again, in case you didn’t know.”

“That is good.”

“Yeah, I think same rules as before. Clint wouldn’t even let me set down on it when I went to go visit him a few months ago. ‘No unauthorized agents,’ Barnes told me. Whatever that means. Anyway, uh, Tony’s in a coma, Steve is gone, Sam is still Cap, anything else?”

“What happened to Thanos’s corpse?” Loki questioned.

“Balder sent it to Asgard.”

Loki did not bother to hide his sigh of relief. It would have been a bit disastrous if the government had gotten their hands on that corpse. “The bodies of the outriders?”

“Same thing, I’m assuming. He did something that made them all disappear.”

“HYDRA?”

“Oh, completely gone. Steve made sure of that. They’re all eradicated.”

Loki considered all of that and then conjured up a very small vial. He poured in six drops of the heill potion and then, without looking up from the two vials, asked, “Where is Stephen Strange in all of this?”

Rhodes let out a long breath. “Good question,” he sighed. “I think I’ve seen him once or twice in the past six months. I know he and Barton had something, right?” Loki nodded. “I think he’s avoiding him, honestly. I know Cap’s been trying to get a hold of him, especially since you were gone, and they needed a wizard. But he keeps telling everyone he’s busy.”

“How...unfortunate.”

“Yeah. He looked at Tony once, a month or so after it happened, said he couldn’t do anything. Figures, right?”

Loki poured in another drop. “I had a spear,” he said, finally corking the small bowl and holding it out for Rhodes. “It was very tall and had a foot-long point. It would be very clearly alien to your people, which causes me to believe that one of your lot took it to investigate it. My seidr is tied to it, as it is my creation, and I can sense that it is still upon this Realm. I ask that you find it for me.”

Rhodes took the small vial and Loki sent the larger one into the ether. “What do I get out of it?”

“You get to be comforted by the knowledge that your government does not possess a spear of my creation and what they could possibly do with such information.” Loki motioned to the small vial. “One drop, once per day. Give the next at...in—whatever time it is now, give each drop at the same time each consecutive day until the vial is empty. Do not give more than one; Tony is in a delicate state and any more could damage him further. If he is not awake by the time the vial is empty, call for me.” Loki pushed to his feet and vanished both of the chairs, sending Rhodes crashing to the floor. Rhodes jumped back to his feet and glared at him. “Keep me updated on the Accords situation, if you would.”

“How? You have a phone anymore?”

Loki’s mouth tigthened. “I will obtain one. Now, if there is nothing else I should be made aware of…”

Rhodes grimaced and put the vial into his pants pocket. “Actually, there is one thing. Come with me.” Rhodes led Loki out of the hospital suite and down the hall, up a few flights of stairs, and into a massive room filled with various screens and blinking lights and all sorts of technology that Loki did not care in the slightest about. “We’ve been seeing strange weather patterns that, well, were similar to Thor’s.” 

Rhodes a few pointed to a large screen that showed various graphs that tracked lightning across the United States. He pulled up a few other screens that were tracking and analyzing lightning and thunder and working on finding the difference between Thor’s lightning and regular Midgard lightning. It was all very...peculiar.

“You have investigated each of these?” Loki questioned, leaning in a bit to peer at the various localizations of lightning. He suddenly felt like someone was watching him and a cool chill crept over his flesh.

“Yeah,” Rhodes sighed. “One of us goes when we get an alert for Thor’s lightning, but we never find anything or anything. It seems like a lot of it is in New Mexico, but it’s not really localized in one city. You’re sure he’s dead?”

“Yes,” Loki murmured, brow furrowed. He straightened back up and paced a bit. “His soul resides in the Soul Stone, which is in my possession. He cannot get out; I am certain of it. He was caught in a cage inside the Stone, and then a time spell on top of that. This is not of his doing. The only beings on any realm that can wield the storm are myself, Steve, and Balder. Both of them are off realm, and I was...indisposed for the past six months. This...this does not make sense.”

“No,” Rhodes agreed, “it doesn’t. You really have no idea? We were kind of hoping you’d know.”

“This may surprise you, Colonel, but I do not know _everything_. But I will look into this, and will also ask Heimdall—”

“Sam already asked him, said he doesn’t see anything. Apparently the lightning manages to cloak whoever it is.”

Loki blinked a few times in shock. “Oh. That is...concerning.”

Rhodes nodded. “We’ll keep checking on it,” he sighed. “But let one of us know if you learn anything.”

“Once I get a phone,” Loki muttered, annoyed. He and Rhodes made certain there was nothing else to be said and then Loki pulled out the Tesseract and vanished with a puff of blue smoke. He reappeared back in his rooms at Clint’s house, and opened the bedroom door to see Bucky blinking awake, curled up against Clint’s side. “Is he well?”

“Never woke up,” Bucky yawned, swinging his legs out of bed and stretching. He grabbed his boots and followed Loki out of the bedroom, softly shutting the door behind him. “He’s just sleeping, right?” At Loki’s nod, Bucky continued, “How much longer does he have to be under?”

“Until he wishes to wake,” Loki replied. “Now, do you know where I might acquire a phone?”

Bucky considered that. “A store, I’d think.” He followed Loki into the kitchen and the two of them sat down at the kitchen table while Loki’s seidr began to make dinner for them. “I’ll ask Sam to get you one.” He pulled out his Starkphone and sent off a quick text, his phone dinging just a few seconds later. “He wants to know what color you want.”

“What are the options?”

Bucky let out a great sigh and texted Sam the question, telling Loki just a few seconds later, “Yellow, purple, green, pink.”

“Green, I suppose.”

“Can’t you just change the color to whatever you want?”

“What’s the fun in that?”

Bucky just rolled his eyes, not entirely sure what else he expected, and then he put his phone down and turned his attention to Loki, who was picking at his fingernails. “He says he’ll be here in a few hours.”

“That’s good.”

A tendril of seidr put a few glasses of water on the table and Bucky picked his up and took a sip, trying to figure out what he should say. Loki had clearly gone off to talk to someone and Bucky had a bad feeling he knew what it had been about, and while he didn’t want any part of it, he also knew there was little choice in the matter. “How’s Stark?”

“Alive,” Loki replied brusquely. “Unfortunately so. He has been in a coma these past months and I believe Rhodes is losing hope he will ever wake.”

“Did you help?”

“Do I ever?”

“That’s not an answer and you know it.”

Loki snorted and opened a pocket dimension to pull out some nail polish. He began painting his nails while he said, “Rhodes informed me on what has been happening these past few months in exchange for assistance with Stark. They seem to have been very busy, and Steve and I will have our work cut out for us when I find him again.”

“You really think you’ll find him? He’s had a six-month head start.”

Loki snorted at that. “I find that you humans enjoy underestimating what I am capable of,” he mused. “The galaxy may be vast but Steve is predictable. He has only known Midgard, and you lot are so...well, predictable, I suppose.”

“None of us guessed he would’ve run the second everything was over,” Bucky pointed out, taking the plate of food Loki’s seidr suddenly thrust in front of him. “I think _you_ underestimate humans. You always think you’re so smart and powerful but we still surprise you all the time.”

Loki looked up from his hands, an eyebrow raised. “Do you have something to say to me, Bucky? Some comment on your mind? Have you—”

Bucky slammed his fist down on the table, seidr hand suddenly turning into a huge, dangerous spiked ball, and he surged to his feet, glaring down at Loki. “You _left,_ ” he snarled. “We did all of that _because of you_ and you left, and then right after that, Steve left too. Sam can’t even stand to look at my anymore, which I always _knew_ was coming, and then it was just me and Clint in this stupid fucking house, _alone_. Do you know what he did? Do you know that I found him, _again,_ wrists slit in the bathtub and I had to save his life? You did that, Loki. We did all of this for you and you fucking left. I don’t see how Steve’s any better or why he even deserves to be found.”

Loki sat up straight and considered the man before him. He knew Bucky was well aware that he would not leave any of them out of his own free will, and while he didn’t quite know why exactly Steve had left, he could not imagine Steve had thought his departure would have been taken so painfully. He did not fear the man before him—what did Loki have to fear from a human?—but he did very much care about Bucky and worried for him. “I am sorry,” he said finally, voice soft. “I know you have suffered, my dear, and I am sorry. But I...I must leave again, and you know that. You are always welcome here, as this is as much your home as it is mine, and you are always welcome on Asgard. I never wish for you to feel alone again.” He paused for a moment, and then continued, “I will attempt to speak with Sam, as well.”

Bucky’s glare didn’t falter but the morning star slowly melted back into his hand. He flexed his fingers as he carefully sat back down. “I can barely keep myself alive,” he muttered, picking at his food, “I can’t be responsible for anyone else. Why...why do you think Steve left?”

Loki considered that, turning his attention back to his nails. He’d gone with dark blue and was considered adding faint sparkles to it, just for something different. “Eat your food,” he said finally. Bucky glowered at him and Loki let out a light chuckle. “Steve left because even men like him reach their breaking point. Steve’s greatest strength has always been his determination and belief that what he is doing is right, and when he achieves his goal and that goal causes the one he loves to disappear? When achieving that goal changes the entire world as he has known it for his entire life? When people suffer because of what he has done? Can you truly blame him for leaving?”

“Of course I can,” Bucky muttered. “Steve has never stood down in his entire life. He _always_ gets back up. Running away is standing down. You run, they never let you stop. I know Steve, Loki, even though we’ve both changed, that part of him hasn’t changed.”

“What makes you think he did not run for the same reason Sam left?”

Bucky picked up his plate of food and threw it across the room and then stormed out front, porch door slamming shut behind him. Loki sighed at himself, cleaned up the food mess with a wave of his hand and turned his attention back to finishing his nails. He should apologize, he thought. His mouth had always been the bane of his existence. Truly, in his core, Loki was frightened. He could not think of a single reason why Steve had left. Had he run? Was he running from something? To someone? The thought of there being something in the world that even Steve Rogers ran from scared Loki more than nearly anything else could. He could not imagine a single reason why Steve would leave his friends and family, and he, as always, had taken his own fear out on those around him. He shook his head at himself.

Once he was done, he dried his nails and ate a bit and then went to go check on Clint again. He had not moved, of course, and Loki gently laid a blanket of seidr over him. He was going to have to begin the process of recreating Clint from human and back to seidr; he could barely wrap his mind around how alienating it must have felt for the man for so long to suddenly be stuck in his skin again instead of his proper form.

Carefully, Loki took one of Clint’s hands and turned it over, looking down at the thick, double scars lining the length of Clint’s forearm. Poor thing. To have suffered so dearly in so short a time...poor thing. Loki sent seidr into Clint’s wrists and hands and arms and wrapped it around the nerve damage and the weakness. Even Loki could not heal everything, but he could help. He pressed his hand to Clint’s chest and noted a bit of resistance before his hand was able to sink underneath his skin.

He wondered what it was like to need to breathe after not needing to for so long, what it was like to feel a heartbeat from a heart that had ceased. He closed his eyes as he felt Clint’s soul and then as it wrapped around his fingers and clung on, Loki carefully pulled it out of Clint’s body.

 _Hush,_ he told it. It trembled in his fingers and he could feel the broken bonds to Laura and their children. How terrible to love so dearly when the loved ones were gone and remembered by so few. _Hush, Loki is here to help._

He puddled the soul in his palms and opened his eyes, looking down at the pathetic thing. It was weak, as expected, and Loki could feel it trembling. He reinforced it with seidr and then fiddled around with it until he could find the bond with Stephen, which, surprisingly, was still there. He was going to have words with Stephen Strange, that was for certain. Loki had _trusted_ him and he had betrayed it in the most severe of ways. More fool him, he supposed.

 _I must begin to put wards around our home to keep you safe,_ Lok murmured to the soul. It seemed that, as always, it was up to him, as no one else was capable of doing what needed done. _Let me put you back. I won’t leave you again._

Clint’s soul suddenly twisted and wrapped around his fingers and held on tight. Loki sighed at it and climbed over Clint to sit next to him in bed, leaning back against the various pillows. He could rest for a bit, he thought. No harm in beginning to set the wards in an hour or so; after all, the Mad Titan and his allies were all dead, and the battle was done.


	5. part five

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Loki sees his friends and knows what he will do next.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry this is a day late, i've been sick as all hell (no covid tho! just regular sick :|)and when i was editing this chapter this morning, i decided to rewrite it, so it took even longer lol. enjoy!

Loki tied seidr off to the last of the wardstones he had prepared and knelt down to dig a small, shallow hole in the ground, scooping away warm dirt with his fingers. He noted the sound of a Quinjet flying overhead but paid it no mind, laying a small wrap of seidr around the width of the hole in the ground before gently laying the wardstone down into it, covering it with the seidr of the ward it was tied to and the seidr that would keep it safe and unharmed. Then, after seeing it was done, he covered the wardstone back up and fiddled with the dirt to make the spot look undisturbed before pushing back to his feet.

Strangely enough, he was not tired. There was still far more work to be done—he had only laid the first of many wards, after all, and he still had to finish his private rooms, as well as putting the house back to rights—but he had just done in one day far more than he would have done in a week or more, even a few years ago. He looked around the farm, at the long stretches of fields, the trees in the distance, the blue sky overhead, and then turned as Stephen Strange walked out of a portal, only a few dozen feet behind him.

Loki curbed his instinct to harm him on sight and merely conjured a cloth to clean his hands as Stephen caught sight of him and then warily stepped closer.

“Loki,” Stephen breathed with a sigh of relief. Loki could not tell if it was real or manufactured. “I thought you lost.”

Loki considered that as he continued to clean his hands. Finally he looked up and met Stephen’s hazel gaze, telling him, “I was taken. By the Soul Stone, no less. And the Norns. But I am here now, and you may wish to see if there is any of my favor you can gain before I give into the desire to rip you in two.”

Stephen took a step back and then seemed to remember himself, lifting his chin and taking two pointed steps forward. “The spell that sustained this timeline ended when Thanos was killed,” Stephen told him. “I am the Keeper of the Time Stone and it is my duty to see that time is well cared for and established.”

Loki vanished the cloth and nodded slowly, thinking it over. “Six months is a very short amount of time,” he said finally, “especially for you. Pray tell, Doctor Strange, was the Keeper of the Time Stone so busy he could not carve out a few minutes to see his lover?”

Stephen, this time, took a step back and stayed there.

“Clint killed Thanos. He _saved the world_ from loss that is far too terrible for you to even comprehend. He worked tirelessly to help everyone stay alive, even those we do not care for. He suffered no less than you, but you, when he needed you most, vanished.” Loki pushed forward, seidr fire catching on his hands, and Stephen put up seidr shields of his own, not retreating but also not attacking. “When we fought during Idavollr, I went easy on you, and I did not humiliate you as I should have. I make no promises this time.”

But before Loki could land his first blow, Sam Wilson’s voice came from the house. “Loki!” Sam called, his warm voice carrying far, “Leave him alone! Get over here!”

Loki paused, only a few feet from Stephen, who stared resolutely back at him. His hands trembled in rage; he had been gone for _six months_ , and this man had done nothing to ensure Clint had been kept safe. He had not even cared if the archer had _survived_. Loki bared his teeth and reached forward, a swipe of seidr fire cutting effortlessly through one of Stephen’s shields.

“You may be the Sorcerer Supreme,” Loki snarled, another swipe of seidr shoving Stephen back and down to the ground, and Loki surged forward and planted one boot to his chest, “But I am _Loki_. You must have the grandest of tales to weave for me to not cut your head from your shoulders.”

“Loki!” came Sam’s voice again, more annoyed this time, and Loki stepped back, casting Stephen a dismissive look, and then he turned towards the house, leaving the doctor back in the dirt. Sam waited for him on the porch, wearing his Captain America uniform, the familiar shield resting on the porch floor, propped up against the wall of the house. He looked tired but happy to see him, some strange hollowness in his eyes, and Loki did not hesitate at all to hug him. Sam laughed against his shoulder and hugged him back just as tightly. “I missed you, man,” Sam told him after releasing him, smiling up at Loki.

“And I you,” Loki replied. “I heard tales of your exploits from Rhodes. It seems you have taken well to your new permanent station.” He motioned to the shield and Sam nodded, something peculiar flickering across his face.

“It’s a lot,” Sam told him, both of them turning to watch as Stephen strode up the porch stairs and into the house. Loki grabbed the door and escorted Sam inside, the two of them watching as Stephen hovered uncomfortably in the kitchen and then steeled himself to go into Loki’s rooms. Not one to miss whatever was going to happen next, Loki followed him, Sam on his heels, and they paused in the doorway to Loki’s rooms as Stephen slowly opened the bedroom door and peeked in. “It’s definitely different with Steve gone, knowing there’s no one to fall back on,” Sam continued, his voice a little softer, “but I don’t mind it so much anymore. There’s been things we’ve all had to get used to.”

Loki nodded, watching with careful eyes as Stephen stepped back out of the bedroom, Clint in his arms. He seemed to be unaware of their presence as he carried Clint over to the nearest couch, and Loki tossed a bit of seidr over them, gently waking Clint up. He smiled slightly as Clint immediately recognized Stephen and slung his arms around his neck, holding him close, and Stephen carefully hugged him in return, as if he was something precious.

Sam tugged at Loki’s arm and when Loki turned his head to look back at him, Sam pulled him away from his rooms. They went back to the kitchen where Loki sat at the table while Sam fiddled with the coffee maker.

“Rhodes gave me...I believe the term is ‘ _the run-down_ ’.”

Sam laughed at that. He fidgeted uncomfortably at the sleeves of his uniform and Loki watched him for a moment before summoning him a pair of Bucky’s sweatpants and a t-shirt that had probably once been Steve’s. Sam sighed at the clothes and excused himself to go change. Loki sat by himself in the kitchen for a couple minutes, summoning the mug of coffee to himself when it finished brewing, and he was pouring chocolate into it when Sam returned, setting his folded-up uniform on the table before getting himself a cup of coffee and making himself a sandwich.

“How much did Rhodes tell you?” Sam asked as he finally sat down across the table from Loki.

Loki regarded him, noting the tiredness in Sam’s eyes and the new strength in his shoulders and arms, as well as the new, unfamiliar scars on his knuckles. “That you are Captain America and leader of the Avengers, joined by various other agents, and that Tony Stark is alive only through mine and Clint’s machinations. He also informed me of the continuing developments on new Accords, as well as a peculiar country called Latveria that is causing problems. Natasha and the Valkyrie are both on Asgard and the rest of the Avengers are with you.” Loki tapped a few fingers on the table. “He also told me about the lightning.”

Sam snorted, shaking his head. “Yeah, and that’s been a real stick up my ass, y’know?” Loki smiled slightly. “Even Heimdall can’t see where it’s from. You’re sure Thor is dead?”

Loki pulled out the Soul Stone and rested it on the table between them. “Whatever is left of his soul resides in here,” he replied, not looking up as Stephen and Clint walked into the kitchen. “I imprisoned him in a cage and cast a time spell upon him. Escape is impossible.”

Clint took the chair to Loki’s right and dragged it as close as possible, stealing Loki’s coffee and then grimacing at the taste. He reached forward and cupped the Soul Stone in one hand, letting out a long, quivering sigh. Loki patted his arm and turned his attention back to Sam, who was nodding.

“If anyone knows that thing, it’s you,” Sam said, turning his head to watch Stephen as the witch turned on the electric kettle. “You know anything about the Soul Stone, Doc?”

“Nothing that would be particularly helpful in this instance,” Stephen replied tightly, not looking back at them. Loki rolled his eyes and Sam hid a smile behind his hand as he rubbed it over his face. Sam sent a questioning look to Clint, who just shook his head.

Sam just shrugged one shoulder and continued, “What about Mjolnir? Anyone other than you or Steve that could have it?”

Loki shook his head. “As far as I am aware, as I am the one who killed the prior wielder of it, I am the only one who can deem who is worthy enough to wield it. But, I must admit, I do not entirely understand the seidr behind such a spell, and there may be some manner of outlier. But I do not have the weapon, so I must assume Steve took it when he left.”

Sam nodded. “As far as I’m aware, he did. I know I saw him with it before he vanished. Any idea of where that could be, by chance?”

“Only somewhere that is very far away from here.”

“Wow,” Sam drawled sarcastically. “You really know him well. Better than all of us, really.”

“Sam?” came Bucky’s quiet voice from upstairs, and then there was the sound of his feet on the stairs as he came rushing down into the kitchen, a bit out of breath. “I thought I heard—Sam?”

Sam stiffened and pushed to his feet. Clint reached across the table and snatched the uneaten half of his sandwich and Loki chuckled and patted him on the head as he quickly scarfed it down. He was glad to see the man eat. Stephen regarded the two men warily and then joined them at the table, fiddling with his tea bag in his cup as he sat down on Clint’s other side. Sam gave Bucky a small, uncertain smile and asked him if he wanted to join them, and then Sam sat back down, uncomfortably clearing his throat. Bucky hesitated and then took the seat at the end of the table, not choosing which side to sit on, trying to keep himself from staring fully at Sam.

“So, the Norns?” Sam asked Loki. “What are they like?”

“Horrible, generally,” Loki began, and he gave a short explanation of their duties to the Nine Realms, as well as an overview of the three choices he had been given. He didn’t go into detail on any one of them, and merely explained it as a misguided gift for the great harm that had been done to him. Clint began to shiver next to him as he spoke and Stephen pulled off his Cloak to wrap it around his shoulders, Clint immediately calming down as the seidr, even as peculiar as it was, blanketed him. Loki also spoke about how he had seen Thor inside of the Soul Stone, but he did not go into detail about what his brother had said to him or what had been done in there.

Stephen spoke up, “Our estimates for the number of repetitions of the timeline were between 50- and 100,000.”

“Aye,” Loki replied. “The Norns gave me the precise number of 84,109.”

Sam let out a low whistle as Bucky blinked in shock.

“How many years is that?” Bucky asked, swiping his seidr hand through his short hair.

Loki regarded the man calmly. “At minimum, the same number of years. The math is astronomically difficult, given that we cannot know how long each iteration lasted, but given that some were only months and some lasted for years longer than that, my best guess is that Thor spent over 100,000 years caught in this spell of his.”

The five of them were silent for a few minutes as they digested that.

Then, Clint pulled out his cell phone and typed out, **I saw around 1000 other lives before it felt like it would drive me mad. I can’t imagine what 100x that would do to someone.**

Loki carefully covered one of Clint’s hands in his own, stroking over his cold fingers with his own. “I can imagine,” Loki said, his voice soft. “I can imagine very well.” He looked around the table at the four other men there and met each of their gazes. “But we are past that. That is done. What we must concern ourselves with is what happens next.”

“Alright,” Sam said, finishing off his coffee. “What the hell is that, then?”

* * *

Sam and Bucky went outside to talk on the porch as Loki’s attention turned to Stephen, who got up again to make himself more tea. Clint dropped his hearing aids to the table and wrapped the Cloak around his head and shifted around on his chair before Loki humored him by turning both of their chairs into a long bench so Clint could lay down with his head in Loki’s lap.

Stephen poured two cups of tea and set down one of them in front of Loki before taking the chair directly across from him.

“This would be a very good time for you to explain yourself, Doctor.”

Loki ignored the cup of tea poured for him and refilled his coffee as Stephen slowly began to explain himself. He’d been engaged to Christine Palmer in the new timeline, and had had to break off his engagement with her, a process that had been rather difficult for him. But he’d done it, he assured Loki, who barely cared in the slightest. Clint was his priority, always had been, so _why_ had Stephen left him?

Stephen was the Keeper of the Time Stone, which meant that any fluctuation in the time stream or any change in time was his duty to investigate and dig out the root cause. He and Wong, along with the majority of the other skilled sorcerers at Kamar-Taj, had been tirelessly researching the new timeline and the effects on the world from Thanos’s death and the final breaking of Thor’s spell. Time magic was very complicated, made only more complicated by the thousands and thousands of times Thor had repeated and then changed the same loop, and it had taken every day of the past six months for them to even begin to understand everything that Thor’s actions had changed.

“I do have a question for you,” Loki interrupted one of Stephen’s long monologues about time seidr. “I have been thinking about this for some time. Was the Thanos killed in this timeline the same Thanos that killed me in the first life?”

“Huh.” Stephen rubbed his chin with shaking, scarred fingers. “It’s hard to say,” he finally decided on. “Are we the same person as we were yesterday? What kind of action is enough to change us fundamentally from who we were before? How do you know you’re the same person who fell asleep last night? The spell that powered this time loop wasn’t stable enough to reestablish the precise same timeline every time; Clint’s own experience as well as the changes you experienced in your own self have shown us that.”

“How so?” Loki asked, although he was fairly sure he knew the answer.

“Thor changed things about you each and every iteration, correct?” Loki nodded. “A perfect time loop wouldn’t allow for that. So some discrepancies had to be allowed for every single time, which means that every person inside the loop was different. This loop was changed, and then when the spell ended, it reverted. We are lucky in that it did not simply end.”

Loki considered that, eyes narrowing. “The Norn Stones the spell rests on still exist,” he said. “Or, at least, they should. And Thor used my seidr to power the spell. That must be why it did not fall apart, because I still existed.”

Stephen gave him a small, sad smile. “Clint said the same thing during one of our first team meetings after the change.”

“He spoke? When did he stop spea—”

“Oh, no, I meant he typed it. On his phone.”

“Ah. I see.”

“Loki, as far as I know, Clint’s been mute in this timeline for years. I…” Stephen trailed off, eyes catching on the edge of his red Cloak that he could see next to Loki. His hands shook on the table between them, catching Loki’s eye. He remembered that Stephen had once been a surgeon; he had dedicated his life to fixing others, and what kind of horror would it be to be unable to fix the man he loved? Once a surgeon, always a surgeon, he supposed. But there was something else, something else about the Time Stone that niggled away at the back of Loki’s mind, but he couldn’t quite put a finger on what it was. “I spoke to Laura,” Stephen suddenly blurted out. “I found her. She’s married to a construction worker, some guy who builds houses. No kids, but they have this huge dog. She did not know me in the slightest. I could not figure out for the life of me how we remembered and she did not, given that she fought alongside us, but she has no memory of Clint or their children. Perhaps Thor inadvertently facilitated that relationship in some way, some action of his that led to it, but she was not even the woman I knew. I barely even recognized her. I thought that I could bring them back together, that I could _fix_ it, but...I cannot. We all—we all lost someone after the change. I just thought...I could bring her back for him, but that woman wasn’t _her._ ”

Stephen looked away from Loki and let out a few sharp breaths as he tried to get ahold of himself. It was a pretty excuse, Loki supposed, but not quite satisfactory of one. But they had time now, time for whatever it was that Stephen was hiding to come out. He supposed that there would be no reason great enough for six months of abandonment, but it was, perhaps, better than nothing.

So Loki nodded. He clasped his hands on the table in front of him and he said, “Six months is a very short amount of time. When I was young, perhaps only a few hundred years old, I stopped eating for six months out of some fit that I wished for Odin to notice me. He did not, of course, and by the end of the six months, I was not even hungry. Aesir can go six months without rest. I have fought in battles where we did not stop fighting for six months; I have fought in battles where we did not stop fighting for _years_. Six months is a blink, a crashing wave, a leaf falling from a branch. It is _nothing_.” He leaned in a bit closer. “I wonder what you would think if I spelled you to be alone and to have all of your loved ones ripped away and to feel the loneliness a person has ever felt, and I left that spell on you for six months. Would it be so short of a time then, do you think?”

Stephen frowned at him. “What are you trying to say?” he finally asked, tone muted.

“I am not _trying_ to say anything,” Loki corrected. “I am telling you that those 84,109 times Thor lived through that spell? That is the number of times Thor killed me. _That_ is how powerful his spell was. I am telling you that I am Loki who has been reborn and remade those same 84,000 times. So, when I say that this is your second chance with Clint’s heart and if you lose my trust again, the consequences will be beyond dire and beyond your imagining, I wish for you to believe me.”

Stephen looked angry for a moment, as if he wished to argue, but then he thought better of himself and simply nodded. Loki turned his attention to Clint and carefully woke him, taking the Soul Stone from him and nudging him until he was sitting upright again. Loki motioned between Clint and Stephen and Clint slowly nodded, taking Stephen’s hand as the witch came around the table for him. Stephen grabbed Clint’s hearing aids and phone off the table and then gently led him out of the kitchen. Clint paused and looked back at Loki for a brief moment, and Loki wondered what he saw when he looked at him, and then followed Stephen down the hall to Loki’s rooms.

Loki watched them go, thinking to himself as he put the Stone back into a pocket dimension, not even wishing to touch it. Stephen had a very, very long way to go before he regained any of Loki’s trust, but Clint had been so alone for so long that a few minutes or a few hours with someone else would only do him good. He sent his seidr to clean up the kitchen and then gave into his curiosity about Sam and Bucky and joined them outside, trying to stay as unobtrusive as possible. Neither of them seemed to notice him, as engrossed in their argument as they were, so Loki watched and listened curiously.

“I didn’t _know,_ ” Bucky was telling him. “I told you as soon as I remembered.”

Sam shook his head. They were standing out in the grass in front of the porch, Sam’s hands on his hips and Bucky’s hands curled into fists at his sides. “I know,” Sam said, “but that doesn’t change anything.”

“I didn’t _do it_ ,” Bucky shot back. “And even if it _was_ me, not this fucked up alternate me that I don’t even _know._ ”

How lovely—Bucky had even more identity issues. No wonder he had run with Clint back to the house after the change; he had probably been on the verge of doing something quite drastic as well and keeping Clint alive had been all that had stopped him.

“Had you done it before? Did you kill him in other lives and just never tell me?”

Bucky immediately shook his head. “No. At least not that I...remember.”

Sam scoffed but visibly stopped himself from whatever he was going to say. He took a deep breath and then said, “I know it wasn’t your fault, Buck. But he was my brother. I loved him more than I’ve ever loved anyone.” Bucky nodded, turning away, and Sam stepped closer, some of the angry tension seeping out of his shoulders. “That’s what I thought until I met you. You know that. There isn’t a damn thing I wouldn’t do for you, but I...I can’t...I can’t reconcile that the man I love killed my brother. It just doesn’t make _sense_. I need more time.”

“How much?” Bucky whispered. “You had six months. How much more time can you need?”

“I don’t know,” Sam replied, just as softly and painfully.

“I may have a solution,” Loki offered up, stepping out of the shadows and down onto the porch steps. Both men turned to look at him, annoyed he interrupted them, but Loki paid them no mind. Instead, he opened a pocket dimension and rooted around in it, pulling out half of a large golden apple. He held out his other hand and the ruby-hilted dagger appeared in his palm, and he cut the half of the apple into thirds, sending the last piece back into the pocket dimension before floating the other two pieces in front of him, the ruby-hilted dagger disappearing as well. “Bucky, I once told you that I would offer you an apple.”

Bucky frowned up at him as Loki stepped down onto the grass to be equal with them. “I just assumed you were lying,” Bucky told him, “or that apple was code for, like, a bomb or something.”

Loki chuckled. “Not quite.” He motioned to the two pieces of apple and explained, “These come Idunn’s orchard. These are one of the secrets to an Aesir’s long life. We would only live two or three thousand years or so before she began growing these, and they lengthened our lives to around 5000. When Steve and I married, Idunn gave me three apples, and each of us took one. I took the third apple and split it in half, which I gave to Clint. This is part of the second half of the third apple, and I offer each of them to you.”

“What does it do?” Sam asked warily, but he reached forward to pick up the closest piece of apple out of the air, picking a bit at the golden flesh and smelling it.

“One bite will heal you of any and all injury,” Loki told them. “Two bites will bring you back from the brink of death. One bite will also extend your life for approximately 100 years, and eating the entire piece will extend your lifespan to a millennium. While the two of you are...exceptional humans, you _are_ still human, and I do not believe your minds could handle living longer than that.”

“Reckon you could see anything you wanted to in a 1000 years,” Bucky muttered, reaching forward with his seidr hand to pick up the remaining apple piece. He glanced at Sam as he smelled it and something tense in his shoulders seeped away. “Or figure out anything you needed to figure out.”

“What else?” Sam questioned, looking away from Bucky and back to Loki.

“You will be generally hardier,” Loki replied, “and will take on a few attributes of Aesir. It will take time, of course, many decades, but it will happen. You will be a bit more difficult to hurt or maim, have some resistance to seidr, become stronger, the general attributes of Aesir. I don’t believe your inner organs would change, nor would you gain any ability to wield or cast seidr, but you would no longer be completely human.” He shrugged one shoulder and glanced between the two of them.

“So it’s like the serum, then,” Bucky said.

“Perhaps, if the serum had turned you and Steve both into something not quite human instead of the peak of your kind. My understanding of the serum is that it created potential and then fulfilled that potential, and the apples do something rather different. I could theorize one of these apples being used to create a potion similar to the serum, however, if the need arose.”

“1000 years is a very long time,” Sam murmured, turning the apple piece over in his hand. “We’ll have to move to Asgard.”

“This will always be your home,” Loki told them, voice soft and sure. “You are both keyed to the wards and this place will stand until I die. I can assure you that will be a very long time after the two of you die.”

“What about the cabin?” Bucky whispered, ducking his chin. “I keep...I want to go back there. For just...for a little while.”

Loki nodded once. Even in this new timeline, he had still snuck to Midgard many hundreds of years ago and warded the land and built the cabin, which meant it still existed. “You know the way,” he said. “You are always welcome.”

“Steve knows about this?” Bucky asked.

“Aye. He was deeply touched and _very_ appreciative,” Loki chuckled. Sam and Bucky rolled their eyes simultaneously. He smirked at the two of them and motioned to the apple pieces they were still holding. “We will be returning to Asgard soon. You will always be welcome.”

“You don’t need to clear that with Balder?” Sam asked.

Both of Loki’s eyebrows rose. “Did you forget who I am in my absence? I am a Prince of Asgard, I do not need to ask for permission.”

Sam chuckled at that. “Yeah, I guess I forgot.” He turned his head to meet Bucky’s gaze and then gave him a soft smile, then brought the apple up to his mouth and bit down. His eyes went wide as he chewed and swallowed, then he breathed out, “That might be the best thing I’ve ever eaten.”

Not to be outdone, Bucky quickly took a bite of his apple as well, and then he and Sam exchanged wide-eyed looks. “Holy hell,” Bucky said around his mouthful of apple. “That’s fuckin’ amazing.”

Loki gave them both a smug smile. Perhaps all hope was not lost for the two of them and their relationship, which gave him a warmth in his chest; surely neither of them had given up on the other if they so readily agreed to live another 100 years with each other.

Then Bucky looked nervously between Sam and his piece of the apple and he asked Loki, “What do I do with it?”

“It will not rot,” Loki replied. “Put it in a bag or what have you and carry it with you. Einherjar have bags about their belts that carry their apples.”

Bucky nodded and Sam stuck his apple piece into the pocket of his sweatpants and wiped his hands off on his shirt before asking Loki, “Your portals disappeared after the change. The ones between here and the Avengers Facility. You mind making more?”

“Certainly,” Loki replied. “It is no trouble. There was a transportation portal from my rooms to...where?”

“The hall outside Steve’s rooms, at least.”

“Ah, yes, of course. Then I will simply remake that one, as well as one from here to Asgard, so that the journey may be easy and quick.” Loki’s eyes flicked to Bucky. “I will give you a transportation stone for the cabin so that you may be alone. It will take you there and here only.” He paused for a moment, looking between them, and then he said, slowly, “Time is...it will be different for the two of you, once you have lived long enough. It no longer becomes something precious, something you must hold onto. Days and weeks and months will pass without even your noticing, especially as you eat more of the apple and need less sleep and food and drink. I…” Loki, so rarely at a loss for words, sought for the right thing to say. Finally, he settled on, “I would ask of you to not grow accustomed to letting time solve your problems for you. 1000 years is a very long time to live if you are lonely.”

Sam was the first to say something. “Bucky? Can you excuse us?”

Bucky frowned at him but nodded, moving past Loki and up the porch stairs and into the house. Sam sighed and scrubbed his hands over his face. He sat down on the porch stairs and Loki joined him, the two of them sitting in silence as the sun overhead began to lower.

Finally, just as Loki was starting to grow insurmountably bored, Sam told him, “He killed my best friend.”

“I know,” Loki replied. He wondered what it was about him that had caused Sam to seek him out for this, but he was suddenly reminded of the fact that they were friends when Sam groaned and leaned back against the porch stairs, glaring up at the darkening sky above. Loki joined him, kicking his feet out in front of himself and clasping his hands over his stomach, wondering if this was a problem he needed to solve or something that was better left for the two of them to figure out. “What a terrible thing for both of you to experience.” 

“Both of us?” Sam repeated.

“For Bucky to know that his hands, willingly or not, took the life of his lover’s best friend? It must be a terrible truth to face about himself, and not only that, but he did tell you.”

“Sometimes I wish he hadn’t.”

“But if he had known for longer and you had learned of the deception, willful or otherwise, would this disruption between you not be even worse?”

Sam groaned again. “Watching Riley die was the worst thing to ever happen to me,” he admitted to Loki, who nodded in acknowledgement as he listened. “Nothing else in my life has hurt that much. So how can I love the man that killed him?”

“How can you not?” Loki finally asked. “How can you love him any less? Our destinies are inevitable; surely you see the romanticism in your lover killing your friend so that you may come together in the end.”

“You might have the most fucked up view on life out of anyone I’ve ever met,” Sam replied tiredly. 

“Perhaps,” Loki chuckled lightly, “but you have always been _meant_ to be who you are. Falcon, Captain America, whoever you become next. Do you not see the path that brought the two of you together, time and time again? How can you not love the man who brought you to who you are meant to be?”

Sam shook his head, sitting up. Loki copied him after a moment. “He _killed_ Riley. It doesn’t matter if I was meant to be here, if this is who I was always _meant_ to be, that doesn’t matter. It’s not about the endgame, it’s about the _why_ and how the end happened in the first place. He doesn’t get a pass—”

“Oh, you must be mistaking me for someone who finds it plausible to hold brainwashed people accountable for their actions.”

Sam let out a short, harsh breath and then nodded. “Fine, I get that. Fine. How do I look at him and not see the Winter Soldier?”

“I can remove the memory, if you like.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Hmmm. Well, then. You must reconcile it. You have to accept that it was something he did, even though he had no choice, even though his mind and body were not his own, even though he was broken down into pieces of a person and then reshaped into a killing machine, and you forgive him.”

“But _how?_ ” Sam’s voice was torn and tears welled up in his eyes. He scrubbed at his face with his hands and heaved in great, gasping breaths. “I love him and I can’t fucking stand the sight of him.”

“Clearly you must love him more than you hate him, as you have committed to another 100 years with him by taking a bite of the apple, and I see no hesitation in you for living out the next 1000 years with him either.”

Sam let out a wet, choked chuckle. “I want to marry him and at the same time, I want to punch him in the face.”

“Perhaps he would let you.”

“God, no. I couldn’t do that.”

Loki considered that. “I can change my appearance,” he offered up. “I can make my face look as Bucky’s face and you may hit me.”

“I think Steve would come out of wherever he’s hiding and kill me for it.”

“Then you must, if that is what he has been waiting for. I will not let him kill you for it.”

Sam snorted, shook his head. “No,” he said. “I don’t want to punch him. Or you. I know you said to reconcile it but...I just can’t imagine how. Not yet, anyway.”

“Then we must wait for the yet,” Loki decided, pushing to his feet and holding his hand out to help Sam up. Sam took it and let Loki pull him up, and then without hesitation, Sam wrapped him in another hug.

“Thanks,” Sam said into his shoulder, voice muffled by Loki’s tunic, “You’re the worst advice giver I’ve ever met, but thanks for trying.”

“I endeavour to be of service,” Loki replied, giving Sam a warm smile as the man stepped back and went back inside the house. Loki looked around for a few more minutes and then followed Sam inside, rejoining him in the kitchen, where he had changed back into his Captain America uniform and was washing his hands in the sink. There was a green cell phone on the table that Sam motioned him towards and Loki picked it up. “Ah, thank you.”

“Everyone’s numbers should already be programmed in,” Sam told him, wiping his hands off on a towel. “I gotta get back, but...I’m glad you’re back, Loki.”

“I am glad to be back.”

Sam nodded. “Bring Steve back soon, will ya? I gotta lot to talk to him about.”

“Of course.”

Sam called a goodbye to Bucky, who ran downstairs and walked outside with him. Loki watched through the front windows as they gave each other an awkward hug and then pressed their foreheads together, standing together for a long moment before Sam pressed a kiss to Bucky’s forehead and left for the Quinjet. Bucky stayed outside until the Quinjet was out of sight, and then came back inside and went back upstairs without saying a word to Loki.

Loki went to check in on Stephen and Clint and saw them curled up on the couch together, both of them asleep, Clint’s head buried in Stephen’s chest. Loki thought to leave them for a moment but decided he was allowed to be selfish and he woke Clint up and gently pulled him outside, the two of them sitting together on the porch swing.

Stephen left a few minutes later, Cloak back around his shoulders as he opened an orange portal and disappeared through it, raising a hand to the two of them in farewell as he did so.

Alone at last, Loki and Clint sat in comfortable silence together as the sun began to set. Loki thought about many things—he still had one piece of Idunn’s apple left, and he had always meant to give it to Stephen, but he supposed he would have to hold off on that for awhile—and he also began to mentally plot out where in the house he’d put the portals; perhaps create another room? There were the empty rooms where the children had once slept, and while Loki hadn’t looked in them yet, he assumed Clint wouldn’t want anyone to do anything with them for a good while. It was good to have a problem to solve, something that was easier to deal with than people and their emotions.

He thought about the silent man in his arms, about the thinness of his cheeks and the boneiness of his shoulders and how when Loki stroked a hand down his back, he could still feel each and every vertebra. He looked out over Clint’s property, over the fields where they had fought their last battle against Thanos, and his eyes landed on the place where Clint had pulled seidr out from the leylines to power Tony’s suit. There was nothing there, no singed grass, no destroyed ground, nothing to signify the great, impossible feat of seidr that had taken place there, but Loki knew. He did not intend to forget, either, nor let anyone else forget what Clint had done. What Clint had done for him, for all of them.

He stroked one hand through Clint’s hair and the archer sighed, curling in even closer to him.

Loki wondered when he had started caring for the humans of this realm, when he had started caring for Midgard to begin with. How long had it been since he had first run from Thor and been locked out of Asgard? Five years? Six? No time at all, really. But he had made faster friends and done more on Midgard than he had surely ever done on Asgard in nearly 1500 years prior. He had gotten _married_ , for one. How many years had he spent convinced that he would die unwed? That he would never know the feeling of being someone’s first choice? That he would never bind himself to another and have them promise him they would never love another as they loved him?

His mouth tightened at the thought of his wayward husband. Steve. He still could not fathom a reason why Steve had left, or where he had even gone. Briefly he entertained the notion that it was him Steve had run from, that Steve had suddenly come to his senses and realized he had married the God of Lies and could not spare to look at him again, and he enjoyed the pull at his heart and the sinking of his gut and the way his chest ached at the thought. But he knew Steve, knew him as well as any could be known, and Loki knew that whatever had changed in Steve’s life, whatever had happened to make him leave, it was not because of Loki. Something else had pushed him to run, and for the life of him, Loki could not imagine what.

But perhaps Loki could not even fault Steve for running; Steve had always been searching for a reason _why,_ a cause to fight for, a war to win. Perhaps that very cold, hard part of Steve that had been hidden very deep inside of him had finally thawed and he had run from whatever it had shown him. Perhaps he had seen the end of war and he had run from it. Perhaps he thought Loki dead in battle and could not face life without him.

Loki enjoyed that thought immensely. Steve, driven mad with loss, forever out wandering the galaxy in search of his dead lover? How truly exquisite and delightful. But he knew enough to know that Steve could access the bonds between them and even with Loki being gone from him, the bonds were still intact. Lessened, somehow, but intact.

He wondered what was different in Steve’s life now, what had changed. Perhaps he had left to figure out what was different and to fix it. But to go beyond the Nine Realms? To go out into the dark, beyond even Heimdall’s sight? He wondered what drove a man to that, what Steve was trying to find, what he was running from.

Loki sighed. So much had changed in so short a time. He looked out over the fields, looked out over the setting sun. Thanos was dead and yet the world felt like it had ended regardless. He would fix it, he decided. He may not have been the kindest or the most empathetic but he cared deeply and truly for those in his life. He would fix it. He could not take any of them back to before Thanos had been killed, nor would he if he was able, but he would make it right. Or, at the very least, he would drag Steve back to Midgard and Steve would make it all right. Either or.

The sun cast it’s last rays over the world and Loki thought about Thanos dying in the light of the rising sun and Loki starting over in the setting sun. He thought about going out into the vastness of space, out into the dark, out into the unknown, searching for one human who clearly did not want to be found. But with Thanos dead, Loki had all the time in the world. He smiled to himself. Even Steve Rogers could not run forever. Loki would hunt him down and demand answers and then bring him home where he belonged, back to their friends and family. 

Clint sat up as the sun sank below the horizon, rubbing at his eyes. Loki smiled down at him and leaned his head against Clint’s and held him close, watching as the fields around them were slowly overtaken by night and high above, stars began to appear in the clear sky. Clint held him as tightly as he was being held, as if worried Loki would disappear again, and Loki vowed to eradicate that worry from him as deeply and as certainly as anything could be removed from a person. Whatever came next, Loki would weather it and come out all the stronger. He’d lived through thousands of Thor’s storms and achieved what even Thor could not.

Here, after the end and at the new beginning, Loki was reborn anew. He would never be anyone other than who he was, but he could be _more_. For the first time in a very, very long time, no part of his life was being dictated by another. No hidden hands pushed or pulled him or changed things behind the scenes. He was free, as free as he’d ever been. For all of him that came before, he was going to live for them, and for all of the parts of himself Thor had once thought to kill and remake into someone else, he was going to claw himself out of the fire and ice and break the mold Thor had tried to make him fit into for so many thousands of years. He never quite did like being told what to do.

He smiled.

He was Loki, after all, and he rather thought the galaxy needed a bit more chaos in it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the next two stories in this series are finished, they are both relatively short one shots that will be posted over the next few weeks. i'll keep everyone updated in the notes for the timeline for the next longer fic to be posted.
> 
> hope you enjoyed! please please please leave kudos and comments!

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading! hope you enjoyed. please leave kudos and comments
> 
> follow me:  
> twitter: @whenhedied  
> tumblr: @deluxemycroft


End file.
